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AMERICAN  PEOSE  MASTERS 


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PUBLISHED   BY 

CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S   SONS 

FRENCH  TRAITS.  An  Essay  in  Compara 
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AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 


COOPER — HAWTHORNE — EMERSON — POE 
— LOWELL — HENRY   JAMES 


BY 
W.  C.^BROWNELL 


NEW  YORK 

CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 
1909 


Copyright,  1909,  by 
CHARLES  SCRIBNER'S  SONS 

Published  October,  1909 


/*>  £>  5 


ilFI 


TO  JOHN  W.  SIMPSON 


77; 


CONTENTS 

COOPER  PAOB 

i  FORM  AND  SUBSTANCE 3 

•  ii  DEFECTIVE  ART 6 

in  ROMANTIC  REALISM 13 

iv  INDIANS 20 

v  CHARACTERS 25 

vi  WOMEN  ..............  42 

vii  PATRIOTISM 49 

HAWTHORNE 

i    POPULAR  ESTIMATE 63 

ii    REVERIE  AND  MIRAGE 65 

HI    ALLEGORY 75 

iv    FANCY  vs.  IMAGINATION        82 

v    CHARACTER  AND  ENVIRONMENT 97 

vi    CULTURE 106 

vii    "THE  SCARLET  LETTER" 116 

vin    STYLE 123 

EMERSON 

i  NATIONAL  CHARACTER 133 

ii  MORAL  GREATNESS 133 

in  INTELLECT 138 

iv  PHILOSOPHY 152 

v  CULTURE .     .  164 

vi  STYLE 178 

vii  POETRY 189 

vin  THE  ESSAYS 200 

vii 


CONTENTS 

POE 

i  EXOTIC  ART 207 

ii  POETRY 209 

in  TECHNIC 217 

iv  LACK  OF  SUBSTANCE 231 

v  SCENIC  IMAGINATION 240 

vi  CULTURE  AND  CRITICISM 248 

vii  THE  POE  LEGEND 256 

LOWELL 

i    IMPROVIZATION 271 

ii    PERSONALITY 274 

HI    CULTURE 284 

iv    CRITICISM 299 

v    STYLE 316 

vi    POETRY 325 

HENRY  JAMES 

i    ARTISTIC  ATTITUDE 339 

ii    REALISM      .     .     , 343 

HI    THEORETIC  ART 349 

iv    DETACHMENT 356 

v    PURSUIT  OF  THE  RECONDITE 362 

vi    CHARACTER  PORTRAYAL 369 

vii    CULTURE 382 

vni    STYLE 393 


vni 


COOPER 


COOPER 


THE  literary  standard  of  his  countrymen  is  undoubt- 
edly  far  higher  than  it  was  in  Cooper's  own  day.  No 
writer  at  present  with  a  tenth  of  his  ability  would  com- 
mit  his  literary  faults  —  faults  for  which  the  standard  of 
his  day  is  largely  responsible,  since  it  was  oblivious  to 
them  and  since  they  are  precisely  those  which  any  widely 
accepted  standard  would  automatically  correct.  In 
other  words,  Cooper  wrote  as  well  as,  and  builded  better 
than,  any  one  required  of  him  —  and  though  genius,  ex 
hypothesit  escapes  the  operation  of  evolutionary  law, 
literary  or  any  other  artistic  expression  is  almost  as 
much  a  matter  of  supply  and  demand  as  railroads  or 
any  other  means  of  communication;  the  demand,  that 
is,  produces,  controls,  and  gives  its  character  to  the 
supply.  The  theory  that  art  is  due  to  artists  leaves 
the  origin  of  artists  unexplained. 

But  it  is  a  depressing  phenomenon  in  current  Ameri 
can  letters  that  our  standard,  though  satisfactorily 
higher,  should  be  applied  with  so  little  intelligence  and 
elasticity,  so  mechanically.  It  is  widely  held,  and  the 
puniest  whipsters  flourish  it  like  a  falchion  when  they 
play  at  soldiers  —  our  popular  literary  game  at  present,  it 

3 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

sometimes  seems.  It  is  not  to  deny  that  this  diversion 
has  its  uses  to  assert  that  it  has  its  limitations.  To  have 
popularized  a  high  literary  standard  is  an  accomplish 
ment  of  which  American  letters  may  well  be  proud. 
Indeed  it  is,  perhaps,  the  result  of  which  hitherto — a 
few  eminent  names  excepted — it  has  most  reason  to  be 
proud.  And  no  doubt  there  is  still  reason  to  hope  that 
our  high  popular  standard  may  become  even  higher  and 
more  popular  than  it  is  !  Meantime  one  would  like  to 
see  its  application  more  elastic,  less  mechanical.  The 
way  in  which  it  has  been  applied  to  the  detriment  of 
Cooper's  fame,  has  been  not  merely  unintelligent  but 
thoroughly  discreditable.  For  Cooper,  from  any  point 
of  view,  is  one  of  the  most  distinguished  of  our  literary 
assets,  and  there  is  something  ludicrous  in  being  before 
all  the  world — as,  assuredly,  we  sometimes  are — in 
recognizing  our  own  merit  where  it  is  contestable  and 
in  neglecting  it  where  it  is  not. 

It  is  only  superficially  remarkable  that  Cooper  should 
have  been  over  thirty  when  he  wrote  his  first  story.  Had 
he  possessed  the  native  temperament  of  the  literary 
artist,  he  certainly  would  not  have  deferred  experimen 
tation  so  long.  Nor  would  he,  probably,  if  he  had  had 
to  cast  about  for  a  livelihood,  or  if  his  environment  had 
been  other  than  it  was.  But  to  determine  the  literary 
vocation  of  a  man  of  literary  genius,  yet  nevertheless  a 
man  who  had  been  occupied  in  wholly  unliterary  pur 
suits  until  so  ripe  a  maturity  as  his,  the  accident  of  a 
whim  was  not  only  an  appropriate  but  altogether  the 
most  natural  cause.  "Precaution"  was  the  result  of 

4 


COOPER 

such  an  accident.  It  has  no  other  merit,  but  it  estab 
lished  the  fact,  which  apparently  he  had  never  suspected, 
that  he  had  the  gift  of  improvisation;  and  when  he 
found  his  material,  in  his  next  book,  he  produced  a 
work  that  established  his  reputation  as  a  writer  of 
romance.  He  did  much  better,  as  he  did  far  worse, 
afterward,  but  "The  Spy"  is  eminently  characteristic. 
It  betrays  his  faults — very  nearly  all  of  them,  I  think — 
and  most  of  his  virtues.  It  signalized  the  entrance  into 
the  field  of  romance,  in  the  fulness  of  untried  but  un 
common  powers,  of  a  born  story-teller.  This  he  was 
first  of  all.  Some  of  his  stories  are  dull,  but  they  are 
never  not  stories.  He  belongs,  accordingly,  in  the  same 
category  with  Scott  and  Dumas  and  George  Sand,  and 
in  general,  the  writers  whose  improvising  imagination 
is  a  conspicuous  if  not  their  preponderant  faculty — a 
faculty  which,  though  it  may  sometimes  weary  others, 
seems  itself  never  to  tire. 

To  be  one  of  the  great  romancers  of  the  world  is,  in  -ft\JAA  '•  HI 
itself,  a  distinction.  But  there  is  more  than  one  kind  $£+.  y&s 
of  romance,  and  Cooper's  has  the  additional  interest 
of  reality.  It  is  based  on  very  solid  substance.  It  is 
needless  to  say  that  it  has  no  interest  of  literary  form 
— such  as  distinguishes,  though  it  may  not  preserve,  the 
exhilarating  sophistication  of  Stevenson.  It  quite  lacks 
the  spiritual  fancy  of  Hawthorne,  the  inventive  extrava 
gance  of  Poe,  the  verve  of  Dumas's  opulent  irresponsi 
bility,  the  reach  and  scope  of  Scott's  massive  imagina 
tiveness,  the  richness  and  beauty  of  George  Sand's 
poetic  improvisation.  It  has,  however,  on  its  side  a 

5 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

certain  advantage  in  being  absolutely  native  to  its 
material.  More  than  any  other  writer  of  "tales" 
Cooper  fused  romance  and  realism.  His  books  are 
flights  of  the  imagination,  strictly  so-called,  and  at  the 
same  time  the  human  documents  which  it  has  been  left 
to  a  later  age  thus  to  label.  There  is  not  a  character, 
not  an  incident,  in  Cooper  that  could  be  accused  of  ex- 
aggeration  from  the  standpoint  of  rationality.  And  yet 
^e  Breeze  of  adventure  blows  through  his  pages  as  if  he 
had  no  care  whatever  for  truth  and  fact.  Second,  no 
doubt,  to  Scott  in  romantic  imaginativeness,  he  is  even 
his  superior  in  the  illusion  which  gives  his  books  an  un- 
pretentious  and  convincing  air  of  relating  rather  than  of 
inventing,  of  keeping  within  bounds  and  essaying  no 
literary  flights — of,  as  Arnold  said  in  eulogy  of  German 
poetry,  "going  near  the  ground." 


II 

The  circumstances  of  his  life  explain  the  characteristics 
t)f  his  books  with  even  more  completeness  than  circum- 
P> Stances — as  has  now  become  a  commonplace — explain 
-J^'       everything,  and  constitute  as  well  as  alter  cases.    He  had 
j)^    VL         little  systematic  education.    His  character  was  developed 
and  affirmed  before  his  mind  was  either  trained  or 
i  •  -r  .'.^stored.    His  taste  naturally  suffered.    Taste  is  the  prod- 
ip*        uct  of  tradition,  and  of  tradition  he  was  quite  indepen 
dent,  quite  ignorant.     Fortunately,  he  was  also  ignorant 
of  its  value,  and  when  at  thirty  he  began  to  produce 
literature  his  energy  was  unhampered  by  diffidence. 

6 


COOPER 


But  it  was  inevitable  that  the  literature  he  produced 
should  be  extremely  unliterary,  and  noticeably  so  in  pro 
portion  to  its  power.  The  fact  that  he  was  thirty  before 
he  took  up  his  pen  is  proof  enough  that  he  was  not  a 
literary  genius,  proof  enough,  indeed,  that  his  talent  was 
not  distinctively  a  literary  talent.  He  had  not  even  a 
tincture  of  bookishness.  Of  the  art  of  literature  he  had 
perhaps  never  heard.  It  was  quite  possible  in  his  day 
—  singular  as  it  may  seem  in  ours  —  not  to  hear  of  it. 
He  indulged  in  no  youthful  experimentation  in  it,  unlike 
Irving.  He  left  school  early  and  was  a  sailor,  a  man  of 
business,  a  gentleman  of  more  or  less  leisure  —  enough, 
at  all  events,  to  encourage  a  temperament  that  was  aris 
tocratic  and  critical,  and  not  in  the  least  speculative, 
adventurous,  and  aesthetic. 

What  encouragement  the  literary  temperament  could          ^ 
find,  too,  in  the  America  of  his  youth  is  well  known.  "*      %*&** 
The  conditions  drove  Irving  abroad,  and  made  a  recluse     ^tfo&     ^ 
of    Hawthorne.     Cooper    throve    under    them.     They     (fo* 
suited  his  genius,  and  when  he  had  once  started  he  ~ 
worked  freely  in  them.     He  was  personally  interested  in 
life,  in  people,  in  social  and  political  phenomena,  in 
American  history  and  promise,  American  traits  as  al 
ready  determined,  American  ideas  and  "institutions,"  in 
the  country  itself,  its  lakes  and  woods  and  plains  and 
seashore,  its  mountains  and  rivers,  as  well  as  its  cities 
and  "  settlements  "  —  as  Leatherstocking  calls  them.     At 
least  until  he  began  "The  Spy"  he  had  never  thought  of 
all  this  as  "material,"  if,  indeed,  he  ever  did  afterward 
—in  the  express  and  aesthetic  sense  in  which,  for  ex- 

7 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

ample,  Stevenson  would  have  regarded  it.  He  was  its 
historian,  its  critic,  its  painter,  in  his  own  view.  He 
classed  his  books  as  works  of  the  imagination  in  the 
rather  conventional  and  limited  sense  in  virtue  of  which 
fiction  is  necessarily,  and  by  definition,  imaginative. 
His  "art"  was  for  him  the  art  of  story-telling,  in  which 

e  cnaracters  and  incidents  are  imagined  instead  of 
being  real.  That  his  fiction  was  imaginative  rather  than 
merely  imagined,  I  mean,  probably  never  occurred  to 
him.  He  never  philosophized  about  it  at  all,  and  as  he 
began  it  by  conscious  imitation  of  convention,  continued 
it  conventionally,  so  far  as  his  procedure  was  conscious. 
As  he  wrote  "Precaution"  to  determine  whether  or  no 
he  "could  write  a  novel,"  he  wrote  "The  Pilot"  to  prove 
that  he  could  write  a  more  seamanlike  tale  than  "The 
Pirate"  of  Scott.  He  continued  to  write  story  after 
story,  because  he  had  made  a  success  of  story-telling, 
and  demonstrated  it  to  be  his  vocation. 

But  story-telling  did  not  absorb  his  interests.  He 
wrote  other  things,  too.  He  has  decided  rank  as  a  pub 
licist.  And  he  spoiled  some  of  his  novels  by  his  pre 
occupations  of  that  kind — although,  indeed,  he  gave 
value  and  solidity  to  others  of  them  in  the  same  way; 
"The  Bravo"  is,  for  example,  as  strong  a  story  as  "The 
Ways  of  the  Hour"  is  weak.  Distinctly  what  we  should 
call  "  unliterary ,"  however,  his  point  of  view  remained, 
as  it  had  been  at  the  outset.  Without  the  poetic  or 
artistic  temperament — at  least  in  sufficiently  controlling 
force  to  stimulate  self-expression  before  almost  middle 
life — he  subsisted  in  an  environment,  both  personal  and 

8 


COOPER 

national,  so  hostile  to  the  aesthetic  and  academic  as  to 
color  what  manifestations  of  these  it  suffered  at  all  with 
a  decidedly  provincial  tinge.  The  conjunction  was 
fortunate.  If  it  was  responsible  for  a  long  list  of  the 
most  unliterary  works  by  any  writer  of  eminence  in 
any  literature — as  I  suppose  Cooper's  may  be  called — it 
nevertheless  produced  an  author  of  acknowledged 
power  and  indisputable  originality,  whose  force  and 
vitality  are  as  markedly  native  and  personal  as  their 
various  manifestations  are  at  times  superficial,  careless, 
and  conventional.  In  a  word,  Cooper  was,  if  not  a 
great  writer,  a  man  of  conspicuously  large  mental  andj 
moral  stature,  of  broad  vision,  of  wide  horizon,  of  inde-|  ^  $ 
pendent  philosophy. 

His  prolixity  is  perhaps  his  worst  fault;  it  is,  at  all  y  . 

events,  the  source  of  the  worst  fault  his  novels  have,  the  (^  W*& 
heaviest  handicap  a  novel  can  have — namely,  their  ^l^ 
tedium.  To  begin  with,  hardly  one  of  them  is  without 
its  tiresome  character.  Not  a  few  have  more  than  one. 
Few  of  his  best  characters  avoid  tedium  at  times;  at 
times  even  Leatherstocking  is  a  bore.  Cooper  must 
himself,  in  actual  life,  have  been  fond  of  bores.  Perhaps 
his  irascibility  was  soothed  by  studying  this  particular 
foible  of  his  fellows.  The  trait  is  to  be  suspected  in 
other  writers  of  fiction;  Scott,  for  example.  For  my 
own  part,  I  recall  no  character  in  Cooper  as  tiresome  as 
some  of  "Scott's  bores,"  as  they  are  proverbially  called. 
Cooper,  however,  in  this  respect  is,  in  general,  unsur 
passed.  The  Scotch  doctor  in  "The  Spy,"  the  Dutch 
father  in  "The  Water-Witch,"  the  Italian  disputants  in 

9 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

"  Wing-and-Wing,"  the  crack-brained  psalmodist  in 
"The  Last  of  the  Mohicans" — but  it  is  idle  to  specify, 
the  list  is  too  long. 

It  is  true  that  to  represent  a  bore  adequately  a  novelist 
cannot  avoid  making  him  tiresome.  That  is  his  raison 
d  etre,  and  for  a  novelist  nihil  humani  can  be  alienum. 
But  Terence  himself  would  have  modified  his  maxim  if 
he  could  have  foreseen  Cooper's  addiction  to  this  especial 
genus.  And,  as  I  say,  some  of  the  best  and  most  inter 
esting  of  his  personages  prose  at  times  interminably: 
the  Pathfinder  talking  about  his  own  and  Killdeer's 
merits  at  the  prize-shooting,  not  a  few,  indeed,  of  the 
deliverances  of  this  star  character  of  Cooper's  entire 
company  are  hard  to  bear.  And  both  the  bores  who 
are — so  explicitly  and,  thus,  exhaustively — exhibited  as 
such  and  the  non-bores  who  nevertheless  so  frequently 
bore  us  have  the  painful  and  monotonous  family  re 
semblance  of  all  being  tiresome  in  one  way — in  pro 
lixity.  They  are  really  not  studied  very  closely  as 
bores  or  as  occasionally  tiresome  personages,  but  are 
extremely  simplified  by  being  represented  merely  as 
long-winded.  No  shades  of  character,  no  particular 
and  individual  weaknesses  are  illustrated  by  their 
prolixity.  Their  prolixity  is  itself  the  trait  that  dis 
tinguishes  them. 

The  conclusion  is  inevitable  that  his  characters  are 
often  so  prolix  and  often  such  prolix  characters  because 
— which  also  we  know  to  be  the  fact — Cooper  himself 
was.  Speaking  of  the  unreadable  "Mercedes  of  Cas 
tile,"  Professor  Lounsbury  truly  says  that  the  author 

10 


COOPER 

is  as  long  getting  under  way  with  his  story  as  Columbus 
himself  was  in  arranging  for  his  voyage.  And  though 
this  inexplicable  novel  is  probably  his  dullest,  there  are 
few  others  that  do  not  contain  long  passages  whose  ,  *t 
redundancy  is  remorseless.  He  has  no  standards.  He  •*! 
feels  no  responsibility.  He  never  thinks  of  the  reader. 
He  follows  his  own  inclination  completely,  quite  without 
concern  for  company,  one  must  conclude.  There  was 
no  tribunal  whose  judgments  he  had  to  consider;  there 
was  no  censure  to  be  dreaded,  no  praise  he  had  to  try  to 
earn  by  being  other  than  his  own  disposition  prompted, 
by  being  more  simple,  more  concise,  more  respectful 
of  the  reader's  intelligence — no  ideal  of  perfection,  in 
short,  at  which  the  pressure  of  current  criticism  con 
strained  him  to  aim.  And  of  technical  perfection  in 
any  but  its  broadest  details — such  as  general  composi 
tion  and  construction — he  had  no  notion.  His  pace 
was  leisurely,  because  such  was  his  habit  of  mind,  and 
there  was  nothing  extraneous  to  hasten  it.  He  lingered 
because  he  liked  to,  and  his  public  was  not  impatient. 
He  repeated  because  he  enjoyed  repetition,  and  there 
was  no  one  to  wince  at  it.  He  was  as  elaborate  in  com 
monplace  as  the  dilettante  can  be  in  paradox  because 
novelty  as  such  did  not  attract  nor  familiarity  repel 
either  himself  or  his  public.  As  to  literary  standards, 
the  times  have  certainly  changed  since  his  day.  In 
literary  performance  there  is  perhaps  an  occasional  re 
minder  that  the  tendency  to  prolixity  still  subsists. 
And  in  actual  life! — but,  of  course,  changes  in  \ho] 
macrocosm  are  naturally  more  gradual. 

11 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 


Yet  even  our  own  time  may  profitably  inquire  how  it 
is  that  Cooper's  popularity  has  triumphed  so  completely 
over  so  grave  a  fault.  Largely,  I  think,  it  is  due  to  the 
fact  that  the  fault  is  a  " literary" — that  is  to  say,  a 
technical — defect,  and  is  counterbalanced  by  the  vitality 
and  largeness  of  the  work  of  which  it,  too,  is  a  character 
istic.  It  is  far  from  negligible.  On  the  contrary,  it  is, 
however  accounted  for,  the  chief  obstacle  that  prevents 
Cooper  from  attaining  truly  classic  rank — the  rank 
never  quite  attained  by  any  one  destitute  of  the  sense 
of  form,  the  feeling  for  perfection  which  is  what  makes 
art  artistic,  however  inane  or  insubstantial  it  may  be. 
But  Cooper's  technical  blemishes  are  in  no  danger  of 
being  neglected.  As  Thackeray  said  impatiently  of 
Macaulay's,  "What  critic  can't  point  them  out?"  To 
point  out  Cooper's  is  so  easy  that  his  critics  are  singularly 
apt  to  sag  into  caricature  in  the  process.  Nevertheless, 
though  it  is  indubitable  that  his  prolixity  is  a  grave  de 
fect,  it  is  important  to  remember  that  it  is  a  formal 
rather  than  a  substantial  one,  and  that  in  popular 
esteem  it  has  been  more  than  counterbalanced  by  com 
pensations  of  substance.  What  is  less  evident,  but 
what  is  still  more  worth  indicating,  is  that  there  is, 
speaking  somewhat  loosely,  a  certain  artistic  fitness  in 
his  diffuseness,  and  that  this  is  probably  the  main  rea 
son  why  it  has  so  slightly  diminished  not  only  his  pop 
ularity,  but  his  legitimate  fame.  It  is,  in  a  word,  and 
except  in  its  excess,  an  element  of  his  illusion.  And 
in  a  sense,  thus,  it  is  rather  a  quality  than  a  defect  of 
his  work.  His  illusion  is  incontestable.  No  writer  of 

12 


COOPER 

romance  has  more.  It  is  simply  impossible  to  praise 
him  too  highly  here.  And  where  the  effect  is  so  plainly 
secured  one  may  properly  divine  some  native  felicity 
in  the  cause,  however,  abstractly  considered,  inade 
quate  to  anything  such  a  cause  may  seem. 

m 

Cooper  is  usually  called  the  American  Scott  in  a  sense 
that  implies  his  indebtedness  to  Scott  as  a  model  and  a 
master.  His  romances  are  esteemed  imitations  of  the 
Waverley  Novels,  differing  from  their  originals  as  all 
imitations  do  in  having  less  energy,  less  spontaneity — of 
necessity,  therefore,  less  originality.  This  is  to  consider 
mere  surface  resemblance.  How  much  or  how  little 
Cooper  owed  to  Scott  is  a  question  for  the  literary  histo 
rian  rather  than  the  critic.  Doubtless  he  copied  Scott  in 
various  practical  ways.  Romance  had  received  a  stamp, 
a  cachet,  from  Scott  that,  devoted  to  the  same  genre,  it 
was  impossible  to  ignore.  Scott's  own  derivation  may  be 
defined  quite  as  clearly,  and  the  record  of  it  is,  like  sim 
ilar  studies,  one  that  has  its  uses.  But  for  other  than  di 
dactic  purposes  it  is  the  contrast  rather  than  the  resem 
blance,  even,  between  him  and  Cooper  that  is  pertinent. 
It  is  misleading  to  compare  them — in  any  sense  which 
implies  that  Cooper's  originality  is  in  any  way  inferior. 
It  is  idle  to  characterize  so  voluminous  a  writer  as  imita 
tive.  Whatever  its  initial  impetus  imitation  will  not 
furnish  the  momentum  for  forty  volumes.  Cooper's 
inspiration  is  as  genuine,  his  zest  as  great,  his  genius  as 

13 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

individual,  as  Scott's  own.  He  was  less  of  an  artist. 
He  was  nothing  at  all  of  a  poet — at  least,  in  any  con 
structional  sense.  It  is  simply  impossible  to  fancy  him 
essaying  verse.  Even  balladry,  even  rhyming,  is  beyond 

him. 

"Tunstall  lies  dead  upon  the  field, 
His  life-blood  stains  the  spotless  shield;" 

— there  is  not  a  note  like  that  in  his  equipment.  For  a 
writer  of  romance  the  defect  is  grave.  Nor  did  he  know 
the  world  of  society  as  Scott  knew  it.  Any  one  who 
can  take  literally  Scott's  generous  compliment  to  Miss 
Austen  must  never  have  read  "St.  Ronan's  Well." 
Neither  did  he  inhabit  the  same  world  of  the  imagina 
tion.  If  he  had  far  less  temperament  he  had  also  far 
less  culture.  His  environment  forbade  it;  and  he  lived 
in  the  present.  His  conservatism  was  a  rationalized 
liberalism — nothing  akin  to  the  instinctive  toryism  that 
made  it  natural  for  Scott  to  poetize  history.  And  con 
sequently  his  environment  and  his  genius  combined  to 
confine  him  in  the  main  to  a  field  which,  however  inter 
esting  in  itself,  is  incontestably  inferior  to  the  grandiose 
theatre  of  Scott's  fiction.  A  splendid  historical  pageant 
winds  its  way  through  the  Waverley  Novels,  with  which 
nothing  that  the  pioneer  America  of  Cooper's  day  fur 
nished  could  compare. 

It  is,  indeed,  in  his  material  that  Cooper  presents  the 
greatest  possible  contrast  to  Scott.  It  is  vain,  I  think, 
for  American  chauvinism  itself  to  deny  that  our  civiliza 
tion  is  less  romantic  than  an  older  one,  than  that  of 
Europe.  To  begin  with,  it  has  less  background,  and,  as 

14 


COOPER 

Stevenson  pointed  out,  romanticism  in  literature  largely 
consists  in  consciousness  of  the  background.  Nothing, 
it  is  true,  is  more  romantic  than  nature,  except  nature 
plus  man.  But  the  exception  is  prodigious.  Nature  in 
Cooper  counts  as  romantically  as  she  does  in  Scott,  but 
it  is  nature  without  memories,  without  monuments,  with 
out  associations.  Man,  too,  with  him,  though  count 
ing  on  the  whole  as  romantically,  does  not  count  as 
background.  His  figures  are  necessarily  foreground 
figures.  They  are  not  relieved  against  the  wonderful 
tapestry  of  the  past.  In  a  word,  there  is  necessarily 
little  history  in  Cooper.  Of  course,  there  is  "The 
Bravo,"  as  admirable  a  tale  as  "Mercedes  of  Castile" 
is  an  unprofitable  one.  But  the  mass  of  Cooper's  most 
admirable  accomplishment  is  thoroughly  and  fortunately 
American,  and  compared  with  Europe  America  has  no 
history.  Scott's  material  in  itself,  thus,  constitutes  an 
incontestable  romantic  superiority.  For  fiction  history 
provides  offhand  a  whole  world  for  the  exercise  of  the 
imagination. 

It  may  undoubtedly  be  urged  that  a  romantic  situa 
tion  is  such  in  virtue  of  its  elements  and  not  of  its  asso 
ciations;  that  the  escape  of  Uncas  from  the  Hurons  in 
"The  Last  of  the  Mohicans"  is  as  romantic  as  Edward 
Waverley's  visit  to  the  cave  of  Donald  Bean  Lean.  Or 
to  consider  more  profoundly,  it  may  be  said  that,  looking 
within,  Hawthorne  found  in  the  spiritual  drama  of  New 
England  Puritanism  the  very  quintessence  of  the  roman 
tic,  thrown  into  all  the  sharper  relief  by  its  excessively 
austere  and  arid  environment — that  is  to  say,  by  a 

15 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

featureless  and  thoroughly  imromantic  background. 
Still,  in  considering  the  mass  of  a  writer's  work  its 
romantic  interest  is  not  to  be  admeasured  mainly  by  its 
situations,  or  its  psychology,  but  by  the  texture  of  its 
entire  fabric.  And  owing  to  its  wealth  of  imaginative 
association,  the  romance  of  the  Waverley  Novels  is  in 
dubitably  deeper,  richer,  more  important  than  that  of 
the  Leatherstocking  Tales.  Bernardin  de  Saint  Pierre 
passes  for  the  father  of  French  literary  romanticism,  for 
instance,  but  it  can  be  only  in  a  purely  poetic  or  very 
technical  sense  that  "Paul  et  Virginie"  can  be  called 
as  romantically  important  as  "The  Cloister  and  the 
Hearth." 

There  is  a  quality  in  Cooper's  romance,  however, 
that  gives  it  as  romance  an  almost  unique  distinction. 
I  mean  jts_  solid  alliance  with_reality.  It  is  thoroughly 
romantic,  and  yet — very  likely  owing  to  his  imaginative 
deficiency,  if  anything  can  be  so  owing — it  produces,  for 
romance,  an  almost  unequalled  illusion  of  life  itself. 
This  writer,  one  says  to  one's  self,  who  was  completely 
unconscious  of  either  the  jargon  or  the  philosophy  of 
"art,"  and  who  had  but  a  primitively  romantic  civil 
ization  to  deal  with,  has,  nevertheless,  in  this  way 
produced  the  rarest,  the  happiest,  artistic  result.  He 
looked  at  his  material  as  so  much  life;  it  interested  him 
because  of  the  human  elements  it  contained.  Scott 
viewed  his  through  an  incontestably  more  artistic  tem 
perament,  as  romantic  material.  "Quentin  Durward" 
is,  it  is  true,  a  masterpiece  and,  to  take  an  analogous 
novel  of  Cooper's,  "The  Bravo"  is  not;  the  presenta- 

16 


COOPER 

tion  of  the  latter's  substance  is  not  masterly  enough  to 
answer  the  requirements  of  a  masterpiece ;  the  substance 
itself  is  far  less  important  than  the  splendid  historical 
picture,  with  its  famous  historical  portraits,  that  Scott 
has  painted  in  his  monumental  work.  But  Scott  was 
inspired,  precisely,  by  the  epic  potentialities  for  paint 
ing  and  portraiture  of  the  struggle  between  Louis  and 
Charles  and  its  extraordinarily  picturesque  accessories. 
Cooper's  theme  was  the  effect  of  oligarchical  tyranny 
on  the  social  and  political  life  of  Venice  at  the  acme 
of  her  fame  and  glory.  Humanly  speaking,  "The 
Bravo"  has  more  meaning.  Historical  portraiture 
aside,  I  do  not  think  there  is  in  "Quentin  Durward" 
the  sense  of  actual  life  and  its  significance  that  one  gets 
from  the  tragedy  of  Jacopo  Frontoni's  heroic  story  and 
the  picture  of  the  vicious  Venetian  state  whose  sway 
corrupted  "alike  the  ruler  and  the  ruled"  and  where 
"each  lived  for  himself."  The  gist  of  the  latter  book 
is  more  serious;  it  is  conceived  more  in  the  modern  man 
ner;  it  is  not  a  mere  panorama  of  mediaeval  panoply 
and  performance,  but  a  romance  with  a  thesis — at  least 
so  much  of  a  thesis  as  any  highly  concentrated  epoch 
must  suggest  to  a  thinking  and  reflective,  instead  of  a 
merely  seeing  and  feeling  student  of  its  phenomena. 

Cooper's  genius  was  a  thinking  and  reflective  one. 
He  was  certainly  not  a  meditative  philosopher,  but  it 
was  life  that  interested  him  and  not  story-telling  as  such, 
even  if  he  might  at  times  get  less  life  and  more  conven 
tion  into  his  books  than  a  romancer  pur  sang.  The 
essence  of  his  romance  is  that  there  is  no  routine  in  his 

17 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

substance — only  in  its  presentation.  His  central  theme, 
his  main  substance,  is,  like  Scott's,  his  native  land.  As 
a  romancer  his  whole  attitude  toward  the  pioneer  civili 
sation  he  depicted  was  one  of  sympathetic  and  intelli 
gent  interest.  He  was  an  observer,  a  spectator,  suffi 
ciently  detached  to  view  his  subject  in  the  requisite 
perspective.  Some  of  it  he  caricatured,  and  he  was  op 
pressively  didactic  in  some  of  his  poorer  books.  But  that 
proceeded  from  his  constitutional  limitations  as  an  artist. 
On  the  whole  his  general  and  personal  interest  in  the  life 
he  depicted  makes  his  account  of  it  solider  art,  gives  his 
romance  even,  as  I  said,  more  substance  and  meaning 
than  Scott's  historiography.  It  is  more  nearly  "criti 
cism  of  life"  than  the  result  of  a  romantic  temperament 
dealing  in  a  purely  romantic  way  with  purely  romantic 
elements  can  be.  It  is  true  that  Tory  as  he  was,  Scott 
held  the  balance  very  true  in  his  pictures  of  the  Cavalier 
and  Roundhead,  the  Stuart  and  Hanoverian,  contests. 
But  there  is  more  of  the  philosophy  of  the  latter  struggle 
in  "The  Two  Admirals"  than  there  is  in  "Waverley" 
itself. 

In  "Waverley"  the  romantic  element  of  the  struggle 
between  the  legitimist  and  the  legitimate  parties,  as  we 
may  say,  is  powerfully  set  forth,  the  passionate  ardor  of 
the  one  and  the  practical  good  sense  of  the  other  effec 
tively  contrasted,  though  largely  by  indirection  and  in  an 
accessory  way.  In  "Wyandotte"  the  antagonism  be 
tween  Tory  and  patriot,  between  the  British  and  the 
American  partisan,  is  given  far  more  relief.  It  is  not 
used  merely  as  a  romantic  element,  tragically  dividing  a 

18 


COOPER 

household  as  it  does,  but  exhibited  as  a  clash  of  states 
of  mind,  of  feeling,  of  conscience,  of  tradition.  It  is 
the  subject,  or  at  least  a  part  of  the  subject,  not  mainly 
a  contribution  to  its  color.  The  reader  notes  the  reasons 
that  made  Major  Willoughby  a  loyalist  and  Captain 
Beekman  a  patriot.  The  book  is  a  picture  of  the  times, 
as  well  as  a  story,  in  presenting  not  only  the  action  but 
the  thinking  of  the  times.  One  remarks  in  it  that  there 
wore  "issues"  then  as  well  as  events.  And,  of  course, 
with  Cooper's  noteworthy  largeness  they  are  presented 
with  due  impartiality,  and  in  this  way,  too,  acquire  a 
sense  of  verisimilitude  and  a  value  that  treatment  of 
them  as  solely  romantic  elements  could  not  secure. 

And  in  the  way  of  pure  romance — romance  quite 
independent  of  any  associations  of  time  and  place — there 
are  novels  of  Cooper  that  are  unsurpassed.  For  an 
example  of  this  element,  in  virtue  of  which,  after  all, 
Cooper's  tales  have  made  the  tour  of  the  world,  take  the 
introductory  book  of  the  famous  Leatherstocking  Tales. 
"The  Deerslayer"  is,  indeed,  a  delightful  romance,  full 
of  imaginative  interest,  redolent  of  the  woods,  compact 
of  incident,  and  alive  with  suspense.  How  many  times 
has  the  genuine  lover  of  Cooper  paid  it  the  tribute  of  a 
rereading?  For  such  a  reader  every  small  lake  in  the 
woods  is  a  Glimmerglass;  around  its  points  might  at 
any  moment  appear  one  of  old  Hutter's  canoes;  at  any 
moment  down  on  yonder  sand-spit  Le  Loup  Cervier 
might  issue  from  the  underbrush;  in  a  clearing  beyond 
the  nearer  tree-tops  the  Deerslayer  might  so  easily  be 
bound  to  the  stake,  be  looking  into  the  rifle  barrel  of  his 

19 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

torturer — reassured  by  his  expert  knowledge  and  sang 
froid  to  note  its  ever  so  slight  deflection  from  a  fatal  aim ! 
"Treasure  Island"?  A  literary  tour  de  force,  not  only 
suspiciously  clever  (aside  from  the  admirable  beginning), 
but  so  easy  not  to  go  on  with,  so  little  illusory!  "La 
Dame  de  Monsoreau "  ?  Pure  melodrama,  impossible 
of  realization  even  on  the  stage,  its  unreality  certain  of 
exposure  even  by  the  friendly  histrionic  test.  Quite 
without  the  aid  of  a  "literary"  presentation,  quite  with 
out  the  supplement  of  historic  suggestion  and  a  monu 
mental  background,  the  romance  of  "The  Deerslayer" 
is,  nevertheless,  so  intrinsic,  so  essential,  and  so  per 
vasive  as  to  give  the  work  commanding  rank  in  its  class. 
No  tinsel,  literary  or  other,  accentuates  its  simplicity, 
and  no  footlight  illumination  colors  its  freshness. 
Cooper  is  hardly  to  be  called  a  poet,  as  I  have  said. 
Yet  "The  Deerslayer's "  romance  is,  in  the  net  impres 
sion  it  leaves,  in  the  resultant  effect  of  its  extraordinary 
visualization  of  wild  and  lovely  material,  as  poetic  as 
Chateaubriand's,  and  fully  as  effective  as  that  of  any 
work  of  Scott. 

IV 

a. 

The  verisimilitude  of  Cooper's  Indians  has  been  the 

main  point  of  attack  of  his  caricaturing  critics.  None 
of  them  has  failed  to  have  his  fling  at  this.  It  is  ex 
traordinary  what  a  convention  his  assumed  idealization 
of  the  Indian  has  become.  I  say  extraordinary,  because 
it  is  the  fact  that  the  so-called  "noble  red  man,"  whom 
he  is  popularly  supposed  to  have  invented,  does  not 

20 


COOPER 

exist  in  his  books  at  all.     Successful  or  not,  his  Indians, 
like  his  other  characters,  belong  to  the  realm  of  attempted  ±A£ 

portraiture  of  racial  types,  and  are,  in  intention,  at  all    <*w|  '7 
events,  in  no  wise  purely  romantic  creations. 

If  they  were  they  would,  of  course,  be  superabund 
antly  justified.  Ethnology  might  be  reminded  that  fic 
tion  is,  to  some  extent,  at  least,  outside  its  jurisdiction. 
The  claims  of  history  are  far  higher,  but  only  a  pedant 
sneers  at  "Ivanhoe,"  in  which  Freeman  asserted  there 
was  an  error  on  every  page,  though  this  is  undeniably 
regrettable;  and,  in  recent  times,  certainly,  the  great 
Dumas  is  not  asked  to  be  otherwise,  though  a  reader 
here  and  there  may  be  found  who  would  give  him  higher 
rank  had  he  been  something  other.  The  introduction 
into  literature  of  the  North  American  Indian,  consid 
ered  merely  as  a  romantic  element,  was  an  important 
event  in  the  history  of  fiction.  He  was  an  unprece 
dented  and  a  unique  figure — at  least  on  the  scale  and 
with  the  vividness  with  which  he  is  depicted  in  Cooper, 
for  the  Indians  of  Mrs.  Behn  and  Voltaire  and  Cha 
teaubriand  can  in  comparison  hardly  be  said  to  count 
at  all.  They  are  incarnated  abstractions  didactically 
inspired  for  the  most  part;  L'Inge'nu,  the  virtuous, 
for  example,  being  no  more  than  an  expedient  for  the 
contrasted  exhibition  of  civilized  vices.  But  Cooper's 
Indians,  whatever  their  warrant  in  truth,  were  notable 
actors  in  the  picturesque  drama  of  pioneer  storm  and 
stress.  They  stand  out  in  individual  as  well  as  racial 
relief,  like  his  other  personages,  American,  English, 
French,  and  Italian,  and  discharge  their  roles  in  idio- 

21 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

syncratic,  as  well  as  in  energetic,  fashion.  To  object  to 
them  on  the  ground  that,  like  Don  Quixote  and  Athos, 
the  Black  Knight  and  Saladin,  Uncle  Toby  and  Dal- 
getty,  they  are  ideal  types  without  actual  analogues 
would  be  singularly  ungracious. 

However,  they  are  not  ideal  types,  but  depend  for 
their  validity  in  large  degree  on  their  reality  of  portraiture 
as  well  as  on  their  romantic  interest.  As  I  say,  they 
stand  on  the  same  ground  as  Cooper's  other  characters, 
and  share  with  them  the  seriousness  a  close  correspon 
dence  to  life  gives  to  fiction  that  has  a  realistic  basis, 
however  great  its  romantic  interest  may  also  be.  They 
are  not  in  the  least  "ideal"  personages.  Cooper  does 
not,  to  be  sure,  take  quite  the  cowboy  view  of  the  Indian, 
and  people  with  a  smattering  of  pioneering  who  regard 
the  cowboy  as  an  expert  in  Indians  and  echo  his  opinion 
that  "  the  only  good  Indian  is  a  dead  one,"  may  find  him 
unduly  discriminating.  Still,  the  cowboy's  ethnological 
experience  is,  after  all,  limited,  and  the  frontiersman  of 
recent  years  has  had  to  deal  not  with  the  Indian  of  the 
time  of  Cooper's  tales,  but  with  his  descendants  de 
moralized  by  contact  with  his  censors,  to  say  nothing 
of  the  "century  of  dishonor."  Cooper's  view  is  cer 
tainly  that  the  Indian  is  human.  But  the  fact  which  is 
so  generally  lost  sight  of  is  that  the  "noble  red  man" — 
the  fictitious  character  he  is  charged  with  inventing — • 
is  not  to  be  found  in  his  pages.  In  general  he  endows 
the  Indian  with  traits  that  would  be  approved  as  authen 
tic  even  by  the  ranchman,  the  rustler,  or  the  army 
officer.  His  Indians  are  in  the  main  epitomized  in 

22 


COOPER 

Magua.  And  in  the  mass  the  race  is  depicted  pretty 
much  as  Hawkeye  conceived  the  Mingoes  of  the  Mo 
hawk  Valley  and  Leatherstocking  the  Sioux  of  the 
prairies — "varmints"  one  and  all.  The  exceptions  are 
few.  There  are  the  Delawares,  Chingachgook  and 
Uncas,  Conanchet,  and  the  Pawnee  Hardheart — hardly 
any  others  of  importance.  And  the  "goodness"  of 
these  is  always  carefully  characterized  as  sui  generis. 
The  difference  between  their  moral  "gifts,"  as  Leather- 
stocking  often  enough  points  out,  and  those  of  the 
white  man  is  always  made  to  appear  as  radical.  The 
most  "idealized"  of  them  is  shown  as  possessing  pas 
sions  and  governed  by  a  code  that  sharply  distinguish 
him  from  a  white  of  analogous  superiority  to  his  fellows. 
Nor  is  his  ability  exaggerated.  In  spite  of  his  special 
senses,  developed  by  his  life  in  peace  and  war,  his  wood 
craft  and  physical  prowess,  when  it  comes  to  the  pinch 
in  any  case  his  inferiority  to  the  white  man  is  generally 
marked.  So  far  from  being  untruthful  idealizations 
Cooper's  little  group  of  "good  Indians"  is  in  both  qual 
ity  and  importance  considerably  below  what  a  writer 
not  actuated  by  the  truly  realistic  purpose  that  was 
always  his  would  be  justified  in  depicting  as  representa 
tive  of  the  best  specimens  of  the  Indian  race.  The  his 
tory  of  this  country  abounds  in  figures  from  Massasoit 
to  Brant,  from  Osceola  to  Joseph,  of  moral  and  mental 
stature  hardly  emulated  by  any  of  Cooper's  aborigines. 
The  only  approach  to  them  is  in  the  sage  Tamenund  of 
the  Lenni  Lenape,  who  is  introduced  at  a  great  age,  and 
with  failing  faculties  almost  extinct.  Chingachgook 

23 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

dies  a  drunkard  as  old  Indian  John.  Uncas  is  slain 
when  a  mere  youth,  before  his  character  is  thoroughly 
developed.  Conanchet  proves  untamable  by  the  best  of 
white  influences.  Wyandotte  preserves  his  fundamental 
treachery  and  vengefulness  through  years  of  faithful 
service  to  the  family  to  which  he  is  attached.  Catlin, 
who  passed  his  life  among  the  Indians,  took  a  far  more 
favorable  view  of  them. 

The  truth  is  that  not  only  is  Indian  character  not  mis 
represented  by  Copper,  at  least  in  being  idealized,  but 
his  Indian  characters  are  as  carefully  studied  and  as  suc 
cessfully  portrayed  as  his  white  ones.  Their  psychology 
even  is  set  forth  with  as  much  definition.  They  are  as 
much  personalities  and  differ  from  each  other  as  much. 
Representatives  of  a  single  tribe  have  their  marked  in 
dividual  differences.  The  Hurons  Rivenoak  and  Le 
Renard  Subtil  have  but  a  family  resemblance.  With 
the  naturally  greater  simplicity  of  the  savage  they  are, 
nevertheless,  not  represented  without  the  complexities 
that  constitute  and  characterize  the  individual.  The 
Tuscarora  who  enters  the  room  where  a  mortal  struggle 
is  taking  place,  extinguishes  the  light,  and,  one  against 
a  dozen,  slays  the  enemies  of  the  white  household  he 
serves,  in  a  fray  as  dramatic  as,  and  far  more  credible 
than,  the  famous  fatal  fight  of  the  Chevalier  de  Bussy,  is 
a  genuine  hero.  Yet  he  is  the  same  man  who,  for  in 
justice  long  since  forgotten  by  all  but  himself,  murders 
his  benefactor  in  absolute  cold  blood.  And  the  incon 
sistency  is  not  an  anomaly.  It  is  an  Indian  trait.  In 

short,  Cooper's  Indians  are  at  once  Indians  to  the^coge, 

— 


COOPER 

and  thoroughly  individualized  as  well._  The  "stock" 
Indian  is  no  more  to  be  found  in  his  books  than  the 
"ideal"  primitive  hero.  He  has  added  to  the  tradi 
tional  material  of  romance  an  entire  race  of  human 
beings,  possessing  in  common  the  romantic  elements  of 
strangeness  and  savagery,  but  also  illustrating  a  dis 
tinctive  and  coherent  racial  character. 


"  If  Cooper,  "said  Balzac, "  had  succeeded  in  the  paint 
ing  of  character  as  well  as  he  did  in  the  painting  of  the 
phenomena  of  nature  he  would  have  uttered  the  last 
word  of  our  art."  The  phenomena  of  nature  considered 
as  material  for  literary  art  probably  seem  less  important, 
less  apt,  at  any  rate,  nowadays  than  they  did  in  Balzac's 
time.  In  France  especially  the  generation  to  which 
Chateaubriand  remained  an  inspiration  esteemed  them 
in  a  degree  that  appears  to  us  exaggerated.  They  were 
much  more  of  a  novelty,  to  begin  with.  The  eighteenth 
century,  even  in  England,  had  certainly  little  minded 
them.  And  certainly  they  are  well  handled  by  Cooper. 
Nowhere  else  has  prose  rendered  the  woods  and  the  sea 
so  vividly,  so  splendidly,  so  adequately — and  so  simply. 
Too  much  can  hardly  be  said  of  this  element  of  the  sea 
stories  and  the  Leatherstocking  Tales.  But  there  is  a 
peculiarity  in  Cooper's  view  and  treatment  of  nature. 
Nature  was  to  him  a  grandiose  manifestation  of  the 
Creator's  benevolence  and  power,  a  vision  of  beauty  and 
force  unrolled  by  Omnipotence,  but  a  panorama,  not  a 

25 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

presence.  There  was  nothing  Wordsworthian,  nothing 
pantheistic  in  his  feeling  for  her — for  "it"  he  would 
have  said.  No  flower  ever  gave  him  thoughts  that  lay 
too  deep  for  tears.  He  was  at  one  with  nature  as  Dr. 
Johnson  was  with  London.  There  is  something  ex 
tremely  tonic  and  natural  in  the  simplicity  of  such  an 
attitude,  and  as  a  romancer  the  reality  and  soundness 
of  it  stood  Cooper  in  good  stead.  It  is  due  to  it  that 
nature  in  his  books  is  an  environment,  an  actual  me 
dium,  in  which  his  personages  live  and  move  rather  than 
a  background  against  which  they  are  relieved,  or  a  rival 
to  which  their  interest  yields.  It  is  the  theatre  of  their 
action.  It  simply  never  occurs  to  Cooper  to  "paint  the 
phenomena  of  nature"  except  as  thus  related  to  his 
people  or  their  story — though  generally  more  closely  re 
lated  than  an  accessory,  and  never  less  so  than  an  atmos 
phere.  But  he  knew  the  sea  and  the  woods,  and  felt 
them  as  no  other  romancer  has  ever  done,  and  he 
made  such  distinguished  use  of  them  as  abundantly  to 
merit  Balzac's  eulogy. 

To  say,  however,  that  he  did  not  succeed  in  the 
painting  of  character  as  in  a  domain  wherein  he  was 
unrivalled  is  not  to  depreciate  his  portraiture.  And 
certainly  Balzac's  meaning  is  merely  that  in  the  one 
field  his  excellence  was  unique  and  in  the  other  it  was 
not.  Balzac,  moreover,  exaggerated,  as  I  have  inti 
mated,  the  value  for  fiction  of  painting  the  phenomena 
of  nature;  he  meant  his  praise  to  be  very  high  praise  in 
deed,  and  it  would  greatly  have  surprised  him,  we  may 
be  sure,  to  have  had  any  one,  as  has  since  been  done, 

26 


COOPER 

take  his  reference  to  Cooper's  powers  of  portraiture  as 
depreciatory,  as  a  putting  of  his  finger  on  Cooper's 
weak  point.  He  adored  Cooper.  His  admiration  of 
him  was  not  undiscriminating — any  more  than  any 
other  of  his  admirations.  But  his  enthusiasm  for  him 
at  his  best — even  at  his  second  best — was  unbounded. 
"The  Pathfinder,"  says  his  latest  biographer,  M.  Andre* 
Le  Breton,  "lui  arrachait  de  veritables  rugissements  de 
plaisir  et  d' admiration."  It  is  idle  to  refer  Balzac's 
"rugissements  de  plaisir" — at  any  rate  as  late  as  1840 
— altogether  to  the  "painting  of  kthe  phenomena  of 
nature."  It  is  true  that  what  captivated  him  especially 
perhaps  was  the  life  in  general  that  Cooper  depicted — 
the  wild,  free,  savage  life  of  the  frontier,  easily  para 
disaic  (in  idea!)  to  a  Parisian.  "Oh,"  he  says  in  a 
letter  of  1830,  "to  lead  the  life  of  a  Mohican,  to  run 
over  the  rocks,  to  swim  the  sea,  to  breathe  the  free  air, 
the  sun!  Oh,  how  I  have  conceived  the  savage!  Oh, 
how  admirably  I  have  understood  the  pirates,  the  ad 
venturers,  their  lives  of  opposition  and  outlawry! 
There,  I  said  to  myself,  life  is  courage,  good  rifles,  the 
art  of  navigating  in  the  wide  ocean,  and  the  hatred  of 
men."  And  ten  years  later  his  enthusiasm  was  quite 
as  great.  But  it  is  naive  to  suppose  that  what  made 
this  "life"  so  attractive  to  Balzac  was  in  the  last  analysis 
anything  else  than  the  people  who  lived  it.  In  "Jack 
Tier,"  for  example,  the  phenomena  of  nature  are  as 
effectively  depicted  as  in  the  somewhat  analogous 
"Red  Rover."  What  makes  the  book  itself  less  effec 
tive?  Mainly  the  comparative  inferiority  of  the  char- 

27 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

acters,  though  the  story,  it  is  true,  is  less  heroic  and 
though  some  of  the  characters  are  very  good  indeed. 
However,  here  is  Balzac's  own  estimate  of  Leather- 
1  stocking:  "Je  ne  sais  pas  si  Voeuvre  de  Walter  Scott 
fournit  une  creation  aussi  grandiose  que  celle  de  ce  heros 
Ides  savanes  et  des  forets."  And  though,  in  speaking  of 
'Cooper  and  Scott,  he  says  "I'un  est  Vhistorien  de  la 
'nature,  Vautre  de  I'humanite"  the  antithesis  is  doubt 
less  due  to  the  greater  prominence  of  nature  in  Cooper's 
works  as  in  his  material,  to  Cooper's  artistic  inferiority, 
and  to  the  vaster  stage  of  the  Waverley  drama — to  say 
nothing  of  the  charms  for  Balzac  of  antithesis  in  itself. 
Cooper,  continues  M.  Le  Breton,  after  citing  the  above 
phrase,  is  not  less  than  Scott  "a  great  painter  of  man 
ners,"  and  "I  fear,"  he  says,  later,  "that  the  usurers  of 
Balzac,  his  lawyers,  bankers,  and  notaries,  owe  too 
much  to  the  sojourn  his  imagination  had  made  in  the 
cabin  of  Leatherstocking  or  the  wigwam  of  Chingach- 
gook,  and  that  there  are  in  the  Comedie  Humaine  too 
many  Mohicans  in  spencers  or  Hurons  in  frock-coats." 
The  criticism  of  Balzac  is  sound  enough,  but  the 
compliment  to  Cooper  is  equally  clear.  To  have  shared 
with  Scott  the  derivation  of  "the  master  of  us  all,"  as 
Mr.  Henry  James  calls  Balzac  (who  has  other  titles  to 
fame,  but  in  the  light  of  a  provenience  from  Cooper 
none  so  piquant),  of  itself  constitutes  a  position  in  the 
hierarchy  of  fiction.  And  in  so  far  as  Balzac  does 
derive  from  Cooper,  he  does  so  in  virtue  of  Cooper's 
realism.  His  Mohicans  in  spencers  and  Hurons  in 
frock-coats  really  testify  to  the  vivid  reality  of  Cooper's 

28 


COOPER 

characters,  which  so  impressed  the  great  French  realist 
as  to  lead  him  to  transfer  to  the  boulevards  in  uncon 
scious  caricature  the  types  which  in  their  native  environ 
ment  possessed  a  vitality  energetic  enough  to  impose 
imitation  even  on  a  romancer  of  whose  greatness  origi 
nality  is  a  conspicuous  trait. 

Interesting  testimony,  however,  to  the  force  and  truth 
of  Cooper's  characters  as  Balzac's  authoritative  approval 
and  their  influence  on  his  own  are,  it  is  interesting 
only  in  an  authoritative  way,  and  as  counterbalancing 
the  judgment  of  critics  of  less  weight.  The  char 
acters  are  there  to  speak  for  themselves — to  any  reader, 
as  they  spoke  to  Balzac.  Sainte-Beuve  praises  them 
without  reserve.  In  reviewing  an  early  work  he  speaks 
enthusiastically  of  Cooper's"  faculte*  cr^atrice  qui  enfante 
et  met  au  monde  des  caracteres  nouveaux,  et  en  vertu 
de  laquelle  Rabelais  a  produit  '  Panurge,'  Le  Sage '  Gil 
Bias/  et  Richardson  '  Clarissa.' "  They  certainly  differ 
in  value  and  solidity,  and  not  only  because  the  types 
they  represent  or  the  conceptions  they  incarnate  so  dif 
fer,  but  in  what  for  the  sake  of  clearness  may  be  called 
the  un-Shakespearean  way  of  being  characterized  with 
varying  effectiveness.  Balzac  notes  the  inferiority  of 
his  secondary  personages  to  those  of  Scott — which  is 
true  only  of  his  conventional  secondary  personages,  I 
think.  For  these  he  had  not  the  zest  that  the  true  artist 
has  in  all  his  creations.  His  personages  interested  him 
personally  or  not  at  all.  And  when  he  has  no  interest 
he  is  the  last  word  of  the  perfunctory.  But  it  is  cer 
tainly  true  that  he  is  nowhere  less  perfunctory  than  in 

29 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

the  creation  of  character,  and  that  as  a  rule  even  his 
secondary  characters  adequately  fill  the  r6le  assigned 
to  them.  Even  if  they  are  not  made  much  of,  even  if  he 
does  not,  as  the  French  expression  is,  les  faire  valoir, 
they  are  real  enough.  They  are  the  exact  analogues  of 
the  negligible  folk  one  meets  in  life. 

There  are,  however,  those  who,  appreciating  Cooper's 
success  with  Leatherstocking,  with  Long  Tom  Coffin, 
with  Betty  Flanagan,  and  others,  have  maintained  that 
it  is  with  low  life  only  that  he  is  successful,  and  that  he 
fails  when  he  attempts  to  depict  the  higher  social  types. 
The  view  is  a  superficial  one.  It  is  in  general  a  super 
ficial  or  else  an  insignificant  view  when  taken  of  a  writer 
of  conspicuous  distinction  in  character  portrayal.  Char 
acter  is  character.  There  are  not  two  kinds  of  it, 
high  and  low,  except  in  the  sense  in  which  youth  and 
old  age,  for  example,  may  be  said  to  differ  in  character. 
There  is  as  much  and  as  little  of  it  at  one  end  of  the 
social  scale  as  at  the  other.  What  types  a  writer  with 
an  eye  for  it  and  a  faculty  for  effectively  embodying 
his  conception  of  it  will  best  succeed  in  depends 
upon  his  experience.  When  Cooper  wrote  his  experi 
mental  English  novel  "Precaution"  he  was  writing  of 
something  he  knew  nothing  about.  In  "The  Spy" 
and  "The  Pioneer,"  which  followed  it,  the  gentry  are 
as  good  as  the  humble  folk.  Leatherstocking  and 
Betty  Flanagan  are  effective  largely  because  they  are 
picturesque,  and  it  is  in  the  lower  walks  of  life  that  the 
picturesque  is  especially  to  be  found.  And  romance 
deals  largely  in  the  picturesque. 

30 


COOPER 

Of  course  temperament  is  to  some  extent  a  factor 
in  determining  the  types  that  an  author  treats  most 
successfully.  So  great  a  writer  as  Dickens,  it  is  true, 
has  sometimes  been  said  to  have  succeeded  best  with 
characters  from  low  life.  If  one  contrasts  Lord 
Frederick  Verisopht  with  Sam  Weller  one  perceives 
that  the  author's  genius  is  most  at  home  in  the  society 
of  the  latter.  And  whatever  Dickens's  experience  his 
temperament,  undoubtedly,  led  him  to  depict  the  lower, 
with  more  zest  than  the  upper,  ten.  He  depicted  them, 
however,  for  the  benefit  of  the  upper.  And,  whatever 
his  feeling  for  character,  his  high  spirits  irresistibly 
impelled  him  toward  caricature.  Naturally  a  novelist 
producing  caricature  for  the  benefit  of  the  reading 
classes  finds  the  material  readiest  to  his  hand  in  another 
class.  Naturally,  too,  a  writer  of  romance  and  ad 
venture  finds  most  effective  what  is,  except  in  its  out 
lines  and  saliencies,  least  familiar.  Stevenson's  read 
ers  would  find  John  Silver  rather  flat  if  he  were  a 
titular  gentleman.  Readers  aside,  moreover,  the  more 
civilized,  the  higher  in  the  social  scale,  the  character 
is,  the  less  accentuated  it  is,  externally.  For  romantic 
purposes,  at  least  for  the  purposes  of  realistic  romance 
such  as  Cooper's,  it  is  normally  of  inferior  interest,  for 
less  is  apt  normally  to  happen  to  it.  In  ideal  romance, 
of  course,  neither  this  nor  any  similar  consideration 
matters.  No  one  expects  a  character  in  Dumas  or  in 
Disraeli  to  be  in  character  otherwise  than  to  be  con 
sistent  with  itself.  The  ends  of  realistic  romance  are 
better  served  by  the  more  elemental  natures  that  have 

31 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

not  been  smoothed  and  polished  into  conformity  and 
are  independent  of  convention.  The  passions  that 
agitate  aristocratic  bosoms  are  more  sophisticated  and 
their  dramatic  result  is  in  the  domain  rather  of  the 
novelist  of  manners  or  of  the  psychological  novelist 
than  of  the  realistic  romancer. 

Any  preponderance  of  low  over  high  life  personages, 
therefore,  among  Cooper's  successful  characters  might 
very  well  be  accounted  for  by  the  kind  of  fiction  he 
wrote.  Certainly  beyond  such  as  may  be  thus  ac 
counted  for  no  such  preponderance  exists.  He  had 
simply  no  talent  at  all  for  caricature.  His  failures 
when  he  attempted  it  are  grotesque.  For  example,  the 
vulgar  American  journalist  in  "Homeward  Bound."  He 
could  no  more  have  invented  a  Dick  Swiveller  than 
he  could  have  imagined  Hamlet.  But  within  his 
range  of  experience  and  imagination,  one  of  his  char 
acters  is  as  good  as  another,  so  far  as  the  class  to  which 
they  belong  is  concerned.  The  "blue"  admiral  in 
"The  Two  Admirals"  is  quite  as  fine  in  his  way  as 
Long  Tom  Coffin  is  in  his.  His  type  is  simply  less 
picturesque.  Perhaps,  indeed,  a  fo'castle  reader,  were 
there  such,  would  think  him  equally  picturesque.  In 
all  the  nautical  novels,  in  fact,  the  quarter  deck  people 
are  quite  as  well  done  as  the  able  seamen.  Lord 
Geoffrey  Cleveland,  the  midshipman  favorite  of  Admiral 
Bluewater,  is  a  charming  character.  There  are  a  score 
of  lieutenants,  most  of  them  of  gentle  birth  and  breed 
ing,  that  are  extraordinarily  good,  each  one  of  them 
an  individual  and  no  more  mere  types  than  the  actual 

32 


COOPER 

people  of  one's  acquaintance.  Griffith,  Barnstable, 
Winchester,  Yelverton,  Griffin — I  have  my  own  idea,  I 
confess,  of  how  each  of  them  looks.  When  "The 
Pilot"  appeared  Miss  Mitford  wrote:  "No  one  but 
Smollett  has  ever  attempted  to  delineate  the  naval 
character;  and  then  his  are  so  coarse  and  hard.  Now 
this  has  the  same  truth  and  power  with  a  deep,  grand 
feeling.  .  .  .  Imagine  the  author's  boldness  in  taking 
Paul  Jones  for  a  hero,  and  his  power  in  making  one 
care  for  him."  This  is  very  true.  Cooper  does  on 
occasion  combine  truth,  power,  and  a  deep,  grand 
feeling.  He  was  the  manliest  of  men  himself  and  he 
had  a  sympathetic  sense  for  what  is  noble  and  elevated 
in  character.  He  found  it,  to  be  sure,  in  the  humbler 
social  types,  but  I  think  not  disproportionately.  His 
patricians  are,  on  the  whole,  as  good  as  his  plebs,  so 
far  as  verisimilitude  is  concerned.  To  find  him  ex 
clusively  or  mainly  successful  in  the  characters  belong 
ing  to  "low  life"  is,  I  think,  to  miss  his  chief  distinction 
— that  is  to  say,  his  genius  for  the  portrayal  of  char 
acter  as  character,  within  the  limits  of  his  experience 
and  the  types  his  observation  suggested  to  his  imagi 
nation. 

If  he  had  imagined  no  other  character  than  Leather- 
stocking,  this  creation  alone  would  set  him  in  the  front 
rank  of  the  novelists  of  the  world.  It  is  singular  that 
this  feat,  as  it  may  in  justice  be  called,  has  brought  him 
so  little  purely  literary  recognition.  Perhaps  it  is  be 
cause  every  one  makes  Leatherstocking's  acquaintance 
in  childhood,  and  acceptance  of  him  is  accordingly 

33 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

perfunctory  and  unthinking,  like  that  of  Robinson 
Crusoe,  for  example.  No  one  seems  really  to  reflect 
on  the  extraordinary  nature  of  Cooper's  accomplish 
ment.  Merit  in  American  literature  is  the  last  thing, 
one  would  say,  that  escapes  notice — at  least  at  home. 
We  have  apparently  a  national  disposition  to  create 
our  geniuses  out  of  hand.  Our  criticism  is  geniality 
itself.  It  assigns  us  great  writers — poets,  historians, 
novelists,  critics — with  the  utmost  imperturbability,  and 
on  the  slightest  provocation.  Certainly  in  no  country, 
at  any  epoch,  has  appreciation  of  its  own  men  of  letters 
been  as  ready  or,  as  one  may  say,  so  energetic.  The 
predisposition  in  their  favor  is  perhaps  the  most  per 
sistent  survival  from  days — pungently  depicted  by 
Cooper,  who  seems,  in  this  respect,  too,  to  have  few 
successors — in  which  it  was  a  wide-spread  belief  that 
on  any  battlefield  we  could  "lick  all  creation."  Yet 
here  is  an  American  literary  possession  that  really 
ranks  with  all  but  the  greatest,  who  is  never  thought  of 
when  our  literary  auctioneers  are  extolling  and  exalting 
our  stock.  Not  long  ago  one  of  our  acutest  and  most 
careful  critics  was  coupling  Leatherstocking  with  Ir- 
ving's  Knickerbocker  and  speculating  about  the  ideal 
or  mythical  character  of  both.  They  were  this  and 
not  that,  et  ccetera. 

Thackeray  wrote  literary  criticism  lightly  and  had 
an  instinctive  repugnance  to  curbing  his  prejudices. 
But  in  the  matter  of  fiction  his  authority  is  unimpeach 
able.  No  one  ever — and  others  have  tried — parodied 
Cooper  so  well.  His  "  Leatherlegs "  is  an  amusing 

34 


COOPER 

figure.  His  serious  judgment,  however,  is  as  follows: 
"I  have  to  own,"  he  says,  "that  I  think  the  heroes  of 
another  writer,  viz.,  Leatherstocking,  Uncas,  Hard- 
heart,  Tom  Coffin,  are  quite  the  equals  of  Scott's  men; 
perhaps  Leatherstocking  is  better  than  any  one  in 
1  Scott's  lot.'  La  Longue  Carabine  is  one  of  the  great 
prize  men  of  fiction.  He  ranks  with  your  Uncle  Toby, 
Sir  Roger  de  Coverley,  Falstaff — heroic  figures  all, 
American  or  British — and  the  artist  has  deserved  well 
of  his  country  who  devised  them."  He  has  indeed. 

From  the  point  of  view  of  literature  the  drama  itself 
is  finally  assayed  for  character  rather  than  action.  This 
is  true  even  of  Greek  tragedy,  where  everything  revolves 
about  the  action,  where  the  action  is  altogether  the  over 
whelming  motif.  The  Greeks  were  nothing  if  not  didac 
tic,  one  may  say,  and  the  gospel  of  art  for  art's  sake  would 
be  understood  no  more  on  Parnassus  than  on  Olympus, 
would  seem  equally  aloof  from  the  vital  interests  of 
man  to  the  audiences  of  Menander  and  to  the  pupils  of 
the  Platonic  Academy,  where  no  one  entered  who  was 
ignorant  of  geometry,  and  where  the  basis  of  .aesthetics 
was  assumed  to  be  ethical  and  utilitarian.  Even  in  a 
drama  which — in  the  best  of  taste,  of  course,  and  in  the 
most  serious  artistic  sense — preached,  as  we  may  be 
sure  "The  Coephori"  preached  to  the  trembling  Fe 
lixes  of  its  day,  a  drama  of  which  the  thesis  is  so  tre 
mendously  concrete  as  to  make  the  characters  seem 
abstract,  the  vigor  of  the  presentation  is  due  to  the  force 
with  which  the  characters,  however  traditional,  are  con 
ceived  and  portrayed.  And  the  same  thing  is  true  of 

35 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

romance.  What  gives  the  story  vital  rather  than  tran 
sient  interest  is  the  personages  to  whom  the  events 
happen.  It  is  the  human  nature  in  the  "Arabian 
Nights,"  in  the  "Decameron,"  in  "Gil  Bias,"  that 
secures  their  perennial  interest.  Just  as  this  element 
in  Balzac  usually  counteracts  the  effect  of  his  occasional 
melodrama,  and  in  Dumas  often  palliates  his  essential 
levity,  and  in  Hugo  endues  with  grandeur  what  else 
would  be  insipid.  An  example  of  romance  deprived  of 
this  element  is  Stevenson's  "Prince  Otto."  Story, 
style,  everything  is  there  but  character.  The  person 
ages  are  the  toys  of  the  dilettante.  "The  Prisoner  of 
Zenda"  is  a  more  considerable  performance  precisely 
because,  inferior  in  other  respects,  its  characters  are  felt 
and  rendered  with  more  energy.  It  is  far  less  "  literary," 
it  is  true,  but  so  far  as  it  goes  it  is  solider  literature. 
What  is  it  that  gives  such  a  romance  as  "Ivanhoe"  its 
value  as  literature — in  other  words,  its  enduring  interest  ? 
Not  the  tourney,  the  attack  on  Front  de  Bceuf's  castle, 
the  bout  between  Friar  Tuck  and  the  Black  Knight,  the 
archery  exhibition  of  Locksley,  but  the  character  of 
Rebecca  of  York  and  the  warfare  between  good  and 
evil  in  the  passionate  soul  of  the  Templar,  as  truly 
the  protagonist  of  the  book  as  Lucifer  is  of  "Paradise 
Lost,"  or  Hector — who  has  infinitely  more  character 
than  Achilles— of  the  "Iliad."  What  would  the  ultra- 
romantic  "Rob  Roy"  be  without  Di  Vernon  and  Rash- 
leigh  Osbaldistone ?  What  would  "Robinson  Crusoe" 
be  without  the  autobiographer's  account  of  his  interior 
experiences  as  well  as  his  adventures  ?  Could  anything 

36 


COOPER 

more  insipid  be  imagined  than  the  mere  adventures  of 
Don  Quixote  recounted  by  a  Dumas  or  a  Stevenson? 
Gautier's  "Le  Capitaine  Fracasse"  is  a  delightful  im 
aginative  work,  but  the  defect  that  has  probably  pre 
vented  its  ever  being  reread  is  that  its  figures  are  feeble. 
On  the  other  hand,  the  character  interest  of  "Hamlet" 
or  "Macbeth,"  for  example,  is  so  overwhelming  as  to 
obscure  for  most  readers,  probably,  the  splendidly 
romantic  setting  in  which  it  is  fixed.  But  the  point  is 
too  obvious  to  dwell  upon.  The  most  inveterate  lover 
of  the  story  for  the  story's  sake  must  admit  that  what 
makes  literature  of  romance  is  the  element  that  dis 
tinguishes  its  classic  examples  from  the  excellent  stories 
of  Horace  Walpole  and  Mrs.  Radcliffe — the  element  of 
character,  namely.  On  any  other  theory  that  now  for 
gotten  masterpiece,  "The  Three  Spaniards,"  a  veritable 
marvel  of  purely  narrative  romance,  should  still  be  in 
every  one's  hands. 

Even  in  romance,  therefore,  what  gives  the  story  vital 
rather  than  transient  interest  is  the  personages  to  whom 
the  events  happen,  and  the  function  of  the  most  romantic 
events  is  largely  to  elucidate  the  actors  in  them.  A 
main  excellence  of  romance  as  a  literary  form  is  that  it 
elucidates  a  range  of  character  with  which  only  the 
imagination  can  adequately  deal,  traits  and  personalities 
which  lie  outside  the  realm  of  the  novel  of  manners.  Its 
environment  has  thus  its  own  peculiar  advantages,  but 
when  it  exalts  its  environment  at  the  expense  of  its 
figures  it  proportionately  loses  value  as  literature. 
What,  accordingly,  sets  Cooper  by  the  side  of  Scott  is 

37 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

his  instinct  and  practice  in  precisely  this  respect.  He 
always  has  a  story  and  always  tells  it  well.  Whatever 
its  defects  it  moves,  and  it  never  lacks  incident.  No 
tedium  of  disquisition  or  digression,  no  awkwardness  of 
construction,  prevents  it  from  being  a  series  of  events, 
a  succession  of  pictures  organically  interrelated  and 
tending  cumulatively  toward  a  climax.  He  accepted 
the  story  quite  unconsciously  as  the  essential  condition 
of  his  production,  and  developed  it  not  only  loyally 
but  enthusiastically  with  all  the  energy  of  remarkable 
powers  of  invention  and  an  attentive  conformity  to  what 
he  conceived  to  be  its  general  character  and  import. 
This  is  why  the  young  will  always  read  him.  He  is,  in 
fact,  one  of  the  great  story-tellers  of  literature — so  much 
so,  indeed,  that  the  narrative  probably  absorbed  most  of 
his  conscious  effort  in  all  his  books.  He  thought  of 
these,  and  often  described  them  on  his  title-pages  as 
" tales."  In  his  day  the  narrative  had  not  become  "a 
slender  thread."  Things  happened  in  it.  Whether  it 
followed  the  most  commonplace  traditions  of  the  novel, 
and  continued  the  practice  of  slipshod  contradictions 
and  inherent  improbabilities,  or  whether  it  exhibited  a 
nice  sense  of  constructive  propriety  and  singleness  of 
effect  (as  in  "  Wing-and-Wing,"  or  "The  Deerslayer"), 
it  was  invariably  his  preoccupation. 

But  if  his  characters,  on  the  other  hand,  show  no  par 
ticular  care,  it  is  because  they  are  the  direct  products  of 
his  genius.  They  probably  "came  to  him  in  his  sleep." 
They  are  not  "studied"  from  life  or  worked  out  from  a 
central  imaginative  conception.  They  are  thoroughly 

38 


COOPER 

realistic  and  yet  imaginatively  typical  simply  because 
Cooper  had  a  remarkable  instinct  for  character.  He 
could  read  it  and  divine  it  in  life,  and  when  he  came  to 
create  it  and  put  it  in  situations  of  his  own  imagining  he 
knew  how  it  would  act  and  what  traits  it  would  develop. 
For  the  time  being  he  undoubtedly  lived  with  his  crea 
tions  as  if  they  were  actual  people.  His  acquaintance 
with  actual  people  was  very  large.  He  alludes  in  "The 
Two  Admirals"  to  "the  course  of  a  chequered  life  in 
which  we  have  been  brought  in  collision  with  as  great  a 
diversity  of  rank,  profession,  and  character,  as  often  falls 
to  the  lot  of  any  one  individual,"  and  the  multifarious 
variety  of  personages  with  which  his  novels  are  peopled 
proceeds  from  this  circumstance — plus,  of  course,  his 
genius  in  transmuting  through  his  imagination  his  ex 
perience  into  his  creation.  And  not  only  was  his  expe 
rience  wide — both  in  his  native  pioneer  civilization  and 
in  the  more  highly  developed  European  world — but  he 
was  conspicuously  endowed  with  the  philosophic  tem 
perament.  On  what  he  saw  he  reflected.  The  individ 
uals  he  met  did  not  merely  impress  him  with  their 
peculiarities,  they  taught  him  human  nature.  He  had 
the  great  advantage,  associated  with  his  deficiency  of 
not  being  a  writer  from  the  first,  of  having  been  first  a 
man.  No  writer  of  romance  has  been,  as  indisputably 
Cooper  was,  distinctly  a  publicist  also.  Scott's  politics, 
for  example,  are  negligible;  Cooper's  are  rational,  dis 
criminating,  and  suggestive.  He  knew  men  as  Lincoln 
knew  them — which  is  to  say,  very  differently  from 
Dumas  and  Stevenson. 

39 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

Consequently,  the  world  of  his  creation  is  above  all  a 
solid  one.  Romantic  as  it  is  in  form,  its  substance  is  of 
the  reality  secured  by  confining  the  form,  the  story,  to 
its  office  of  creating  the  illusion  and  not  constituting 
the  primum  mobile.  Slipshodas  his  story  is  now  and 
then  in  disregarding  probability  and  consistency  an  far" 
as  incident  is  concerned,  the  characters  are 


promised  by  this  carelessness^  and  where  they  are  con- 
cerned  he  always  checTEshis  romance  by  the  law  of  the 
situation,  so  to  speak.  They  never  share  the  occasional 
improbability  or  inconsistency  of  the  events  in  which 
they  participate,  and  the  latter,  accordingly,  in  any  large 
sense,  count  no  more  than  a  self-correcting  misprint. 
The  consistency  of  Leatherstocking's  character,  for 
example,  is  hardly  affected  by  his  being  represented  as 
eighty  years  old  on  one  page  of  "The  Prairie"  and 
eighty-odd  on  another.  In  "The  Deerslayer"  a  sin 
gle  set  of  chessmen  is  provided  with  five  castles.  But 
such  carelessness  does  not  destroy  the  illusion  of  the 
story  sufficiently  to  impair  the  integrity  of  the  char 
acters.  These  surely  triumph  over  even  a  superfluity 
of  chess  castles,  and  like  their  congeners  in  all,  or  nearly 
all,  the  other  books,  establish  the  solidity  of  the  world 
they  inhabit  by  the  definiteness,  completeness,  and  com 
prehension  with  which  they  are  portrayed. 

No  writer,  not  even  the  latest  so-called  psychological 
novelist,  ever  better  understood  the  central  and  cardinal 
principle  of  enduing  a  character  with  life  and  reality  — 
namely,  the  portrayal  of  its  moral  complexity.  The 
equal  in  this  vital  respect  of  the  New  Hampshire  man, 

40 


COOPER 

Ithuel  Bolt,  in  "  Wing-and-Wing,"  hardly  exists  in  Scott, 
and  must  be  sought  in  Thackeray  or  George  Eliot. 
An  essay  could  be  written  on  him  as  on  a  character  of 
history.  As  a  New  England  type,  too,  he  is  a  master 
piece  of  great  representative  value.  Having  him  end 
his  days  as  a  deacon  of  his  especial  denomination,  after 
a  lifetime  of  chicane  and  deceit,  notably  self-deception, 
was  an  inspiration,  which  must  have  been  appreciated, 
even,  or  perhaps  particularly,  in  New  Hampshire  itself. 
Spike  in  "  Jack  Tier  "  is  a  scoundrel,  but  he  has,  neverthe 
less,  a  side  in  virtue  of  which  his  wife  clings  to  him — 
far  otherwise  explicably  than  Nancy  to  Bill  Sikes,  for 
example.  The  struggle  between  good  and  evil  impulses 
in  the  breast  of  the  Red  Rover  is  a  truly  heroic  por 
trayal.  The  internal  conflict  that  paralyzes  the  will  of 
the  "blue"  admiral  in  "The  Two  Admirals"  is  treated 
with  truly  psychologic  insight.  To  open  any  of  the 
more  important  "tales"  is  to  enter  a  company  of  per 
sonages  in  each  of  whom  coexist — in  virtue  of  the  subtle 
law  that  constitutes  character  by  unifying  moral  com 
plexity — foibles,  capacities,  qualities,  defects,  weakness 
and  strength,  good  and  bad,  and  the  inveterate  hetero 
geneity  of  the  human  heart  is  fused  into  a  single  person 
ality.  And  the  variety,  the  multifariousness  of  the  pop 
ulous  world  that  these  personages,  thus  constituted, 
compose,  is  an  analogue  on  a  larger  scale  of  their  own 
individual  differentiation.  Cooper's  world  is  a  micro 
cosm  quite  worthy  to  be  set  by  the  side  of  those  of 
the  great  masters  of  fiction  and,  quite  as  effectively 
as  theirs,  mirroring  a  synthesis  of  the  actual  world  to 

41 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

which  it  corresponds,  based  on  a  range  of  experience 
and  framed  with  imaginative  powers  equalled  by  them 
alone. 

VI 

Cooper's  women  are  generally  believed,  I  suppose, 
especially  to  illustrate  his  limitations  as  a  novelist  of 
character.  They  are  usually  decried  if  not  derided. 
His  heroines  are  deemed  the  woodenest  of  conventional 
types,  and  their  sisters  the  most  mechanical  of  foils. 
Their  creator's  practice  of  referring  to  them  as  "females" 
is  found  amusing,  for  though  it  was  a  common  enough 
practice  of  his  day  it  has  certainly  become  so  obsolete 
as  to  seem  singular  to  the  reader  of  current  books  ex 
clusively.  Professor  Lounsbury,  who  is  the  wittiest  of 
writers,  and  in  consequence  a  little  at  the  mercy  of  a 
master  faculty,  has  a  good  deal  of  fun  with  these 
"females"  in  his  model  biography.  He  pictures  for 
them  all  "the  same  dreary  and  rather  inane  future,"  as 
members  of  Dorcas  societies,  as  "carrying  to  the  poor 
bundles  of  tracts  and  packages  of  tea,"  as  haling  ragged 
children  into  the  Sunday-school  and  making  slippers  for 
the  rector.  He  says  that  "in  fiction  at  least  one  longs 
for  a  ruddier  life  than  flows  in  the  veins  of  these  pale 
bleached-out  personifications  of  the  proprieties,"  though 
"they  may  possibly  be  far  more  agreeable  to  live  with" 
than  the  "women  for  whom  men  are  willing  or  anxious 
to  die."  As  regards  not  by  any  means  all  but  a  certain 
class  of  Cooper's  "females,"  one  can  but  "feel  what  he 
means."  Tastes  differ,  and  in  the  quiet  scholastic  closes 

42 


COOPER 

of  New  Haven  no  doubt  they  like  a  little  more  gin 
ger,  "in  fiction  at  least,"  than  palates  more  accustomed 
to  it  demand.  In  the  dustier  and  more  driving  world 
at  large  the  simplicity  and  sweetness  of  these  natures 
may  be  considered  to  make  in  an  equivalent  way  the 
same  appeal  of  novelty.  However  what  "  one  longs  for, 
in  fiction  at  least,"  is  not  the  measure  of  a  novelist's 
success  in  character  portraiture.  To  say  that  his  char 
acters  are  conventional  is,  if  they  are,  a  just  reproach. 
To  say  that  they  are  insipid  is  not.  Professor  Lounsbury 
may  very  explicably  sigh  for  "the  stormier  characters  of 
fiction  that" — as  he  conceives — "are  dear  to  the  carnal- 
minded,"  and  the  carnal-minded  may  in  turn  perversely 
delight  in  Arcadian  innocence;  but  the  business  of  the 
novelist,  and  of  the  realistic  romance  writer  such  as 
Cooper,  is  to  "pander"  to  the  desires  of  neither,  but  to 
"feel"  his  characters  as  individuals,  whatever  their 
nature,  and  to  depict  them  with  personal  zest  and 
attention. 

It  would,  of  course,  be  idle  to  deny  that  some  of 
Cooper's  "females"  are  conventional,  but  I  think  they 
are  far  fewer  than  is  popularly  imagined.  Some,  at  all 
events,  of  those  gentle  and  placid  beings  that  he  was 
fond  of  creating  are  very  real.  It  is  possibly  because 
they  are  measured  by  the  standard  provided  by  more 
modern  fiction  rather  than  by  actual  life  that  they  are 
found  conventional.  They  would  appear  truer  accord 
ing  to  this  paradoxical  standard  if  they  were  more  ex 
ceptional.  But  the  very  definite  forecast  that  Professor 
Lounsbury  makes  for  them  shows  how  real  they  seem 

43 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

to  him,  after  all.  The  reader,  he  says,  "  is  as  sure  as  if 
their  career  had  been  actually  unrolled  before  his  eyes 
of  the  part  they  will  play  in  life."  They  are  types  of  a 
kind  of  woman  probably  far  more  persistent  in  life 
than  in  fiction  and  more  persistent  in  life  than  is  gener 
ally  suspected  at  the  present  perhaps  transitional  crisis 
in  mankind's  view  of  woman.  In  fiction  we  have,  for 
the  moment  at  least,  and  except  in  such  rare  instances 
as  the  fiction  of  Mr.  Howells,  lost  sight  of  that  side  of  the 
"female"  in  virtue  of  which  she  used  to  be  called  "the 
weaker  vessel."  The  rise  and  education,  the  enormous 
increase  and  differentiation  of  the  activities  of  woman 
at  the  present  time,  have  in  life  also  somewhat  obscured 
this  side  of  her  nature.  It  is,  however,  too  essential  and 
integral  a  side  to  be  more  than  temporarily  forgotten, 
and  it  would  not  be  surprising  if,  in  the  not  remote 
future,  some  disquietude  at  woman's  failure  to  take  very 
significant  advantage  of  her  very  signal  opportunities 
should  qualify  the  current  conviction  that  her  insignifi 
cance  hitherto  has  been  wholly  due  to  her  subjection. 
"Educate  them  as  much  as  you  please  and  give  them  all 
the  privileges  they  want/'  observed  an  empirical  phil 
osopher  once,  "you  will  still  have  to  take  care  of  them." 
Woman  herself  would  probably  still  agree  that  when 
pain  and  anguish  wring  her  brow  the  male  of  her  species 
is  called  upon  to  be  a  ministering  angel  of  extremely 
energetic  efficiency.  Cooper's  women  certainly  have  to 
be  taken  care  of,  but  this  fact  does  not  demonstrate 
them  to  be  wooden  and  conventional,  and  is  apparently 
not  inconsistent  with  the  nature  of  the  ewig  Weibliches, 

44 


COOPER 

however  tame  the  resultant  fiction,  as  fiction,  may  be 
found. 

At  any  rate,  these  types  existed  in  abundance  in 
Cooper's  day,  and  were  not  perfunctorily  adopted  by 
him  from  the  characterless  religious  and  other  contem 
porary  novel.  JDtJsJn  range  rather  than  in  quality  that 
his  portraiture  of  women  is  deficient.  He  portrayecTthe 
types  he  knew  as  realistically  as  he  did  his  men,  but  his 
knowledge  of  women  was  not  wide.  He  was  eminently 
a  man's  man.  The  domestic  affections  probably  taught 
him  most  of  what  he  knew  of  woman,  and  of  women  in 
general  he  probably  met  comparatively  few.  And  of 
these,  of  course,  he  "studied"  none,  that  particular  exer 
cise  of  the  literary  artist's  faculties  being  in  his  day  but 
imperfectly  developed.  His  clinging  weaklings  are  as 
good  as  Scott's,  I  think.  But  he  had  nothing  like  Scott's 
social  experience,  and  his  women  are  less  varied  in  con 
sequence.  Possibly,  also,  they  are  less  varied  because 
he  had  less  ideality;  for  Scott  was  a  poet  and  Cooper 
was  not;  though  I  think  he  shows  a  very  charming 
ideality  in  his  treatment  of  his  women — not  only  is  not 
one  of  them  brutally  limned,  but  there  is  a  marked 
chivalry  in  his  treatment  of  all  of  them.  Moreover,  in 
some  of  them  there  is  a  spiritual  strength  that  qualifies 
their  softness  very  nobly  as  well  as  very  truly.  There  is 
scarcely  in  all  Scott  the  equal  in  this  respect  of  Ghita 
Caraccioli,  in  "Wing-and-Wing" — a  tale  which,  aside 
from  its  adventurous  interest  and  the  admirable  art  that 
makes  it  exceptional  among  Cooper's  works,  is  a  par 
ticularly  moving  love  story. 

45 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

And  the  range  of  Cooper's  female  characters  is  far 
wider  than  is  commonly  appreciated  or  than  is  common 
in  romance.  Romance  in  general  does  not  very  insist 
ently  demand  the  feminine  element — except,  of  course, 
the  romance  that  demands  nothing  else — such  as  "Paul 
et  Virginie."  In  the  romance  of  adventure  woman,  al 
most  of  necessity,  plajs_jL^uj)or^inate^  part.  She  is 
almostinevitably  reduced  to  the  type,  in  order  to  count 
as  a  dramatic  factor.  The  realism  of  Cooper's  romance 
appears  here  as  elsewhere.  There  are  few  of  his  women 
who  are  purely  lay  figures  even  among  the  insipid  ones, 
as  I  have  said,  at  least  if  we  except  the  inferior  novels — 
novels  which,  in  Cooper's  case,  ought  not  to  be  con 
sidered  at  all;  he  wrote  enough  good  ones  to  earn  neg 
ligibility  for  such  books  as  " Mercedes  of  Castile"  and 
"The  Ways  of  the  Hour."  Even  such  effaced  char 
acters  as  Alice  Munro  in  "The  Last  of  the  Mohicans" 
are  real  enough.  In  almost  every  case,  however  insig 
nificant  and  insipid  they  may  be,  they  have  the  effect  of 
being  thoroughly  alive — of  having  been  felt  and  defi 
nitely  visualized  by  their  author.  To  this  extent  and  in 
this  way  they  bear,  perhaps,  even  more  striking  witness 
to  his  master  faculty,  the  faculty  of  creating  character, 
than  their  more  accentuated  sisters. 

But  these  latter  are,  for  romance,  as  distinguished 
from  the  novel  of  character  and  manners  pure  and 
simple  (which  Cooper  essayed,  to  be  sure,  but  in  which 
certainly  his  success  was  not  notable),  unusually  numer 
ous  and  varied.  Compare  the  women  of  "Ivanhoe" 
and  "Waverley,"  for  example,  with  those  of  "The  Last 

46 


COOPER 

of  the  Mohicans"  and  "The  Deerslayer."  The  back 
ground  of  the  two  former  books  has  more  dignity  and 
importance  than  the  woods  of  America  in  the  middle  of 
the  eighteenth  century  could  possibly  provide.  But  the 
characters  of  the  four  American  "females"  and  the  con 
trast  between  the  members  of  each  couple  of  them  are  at 
least  as  firmly  drawn,  as  vivid,  and  as  effective;  they  do 
not  so  markedly  function  merely  as  antagonistic  influ 
ences  on  the  heart  of  the  hero  or  the  action  of  the  tale. 
Cora  Munro,  with  her  strain  of  negro  blood  appealing 
so  strongly  to  both  of  her  redskin  admirers,  her  inevi-i 
tably  hopeless  passion  for  Hey  ward  and  her  truly  tragic  j 
predestination,  is  an  original  and  admirable  creation. 
The  two  girls  in  "The  Deerslayer"  are  masterpieces. 
Judith  Hutter  particularly  is  a  character  worthy  of  a 
place  among  the  important  figures  of  fiction.  Her 
beauty,  her  worldliness,  her  exotic  refinement,  set  off 
against  the  rude  and  vulgar  background  of  her  family 
environment  and  blending  exquisitely  with  the  wild 
beauty  of  her  lacustrine  surroundings,  her  sensibility  to 
such  simple  elevation  as  she  finds  in  the  Deerslayer's 
character,  the  delicacy  of  her  wooing  of  him  and  acqui 
escence  in  his  rejection  of  her,  and  her  final  acceptance 
of  her  inevitable  fate,  compose  a  portrait  with  acces 
sories  rare  in  fiction  of  any  kind  and  particularly  rare 
in  romance. 

The  feeble-minded  Hetty,  who  serves  superficially  as 
her  foil,  is  portrayed  with  equal  attentiveness  and  great 
delicacy.  There  is  something  very  gentle  and  attaching 
in  the  art  with  which  Cooper,  quite  without  the  con- 

47 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

sciousness  of  doing  anything  unusual,  and  as  simply  as 
if  it  were  the  most  natural  thing  in  the  world,  achieves 
the  difficult  task  of  making  convincing  and  interesting 
a  character  whose  rectitude  and  fearlessness  of  nature 
enable  her  to  play  a  role  of  pathetic  dignity  hardly  ham 
pered  by  a  clouded  mind.  Here  his  touch,  so  heavy  in 
generalization,  in  humor,  and  in  broader  portraiture 
often,  is  lightness  itself.  Some  sympathetic  strain  in 
his  nature  endued  him,  too,  with  an  analogous  felicity  in 
portraying  such  Ariel-like  women  as  the  masquerading 
mistresses  of  the  Red  Rover  and  the  Skimmer  of  the 
Seas.  These  characters  with  him  are  the  very  converse 
of  conventional,  both  in  conception  and  in  presentation, 
and  they  are  at  the  same  time  perfectly  embodied  and 
realized  with  a  definiteness  and  verisimilitude  such  as 
Scott  in  vain  labored  to  impute  to  his  tricksy  Fenella  in 
"Peveril  of  the  Peak."  They  have  the  touch  of  fancy 
and  the  magic  of  strangeness,  but  they  are  understood 
as  women  in  a  way  quite  beyond  the  reach  of  a  writer  to 
whom  the  sex  is  the  sealed  book  it  is  sometimes  asserted 
to  have  been  for  Cooper. 

Katharine  Plowden  in  "The  Pilot"  is  a  breezy  and 
even  a  brilliant  girl.  The  heroine  of  "The  Bravo"  is 
extremely  winning  and  pathetic.  Mildred  Button  in 
"The  Two  Admirals"  has  as  much  dignity  and  resource 
as  gentleness.  The  Wept  of  Wish- ton- Wish  is  a  unique 
study,  or  at  least  sketch,  of  a  white  girl  with  an  Indian 
soul.  Maud  Willoughby  in  "Wyandotte"  is  a  charm 
ing  beauty  with  a  reserve  of  force  such  as  Kingsley 
might  have  conceived.  And  of  Betty  Flanagan  in 

48 


COOPER 

"The  Spy"  it  is  perhaps  enough  to  record  Miss  Edge- 
worth's  testimony  in  a  letter  to  the  author  asserting  that 
no  Irish  pen  could  have  drawn  her  better.  In  fine,  to 
my  own  sense,  at  least,  Cooper  drew  well  in  the  main 
such  women  as  he  drew.  Of  some  of  them  he  made 
memorable  successes.  That  he  drew  no  great  variety 
of  them  and  essentially  duplicated  his  "females"  now 
and  then  was  very  largely  due  to  the  limitedness  of  his 
experience,  so  generally  confined  to  his  acquaintance 
with  his  own  sex  save  for  a  circle  probably  without 
much  variety.  The  wide  experience  of  people  he 
speaks  of  in  "The  Two  Admirals"  in  the  passage  I  have 
already  cited  refers  exclusively  to  men.  Of  course  if  he 
had  been  a  sufficiently  imaginative  writer,  if  rather  his 
imagination  had  not  been  less  spiritual  than  romantic, 
he  would  have  been  less  dependent  on  experience.  But 
the  romantic  writer  with  a  spiritual  imagination  is  apt 
to  be  as  insubstantial  as  he  is  rare,  and  in  his  portraits 
of  women,  as  elsewhere,  Cooper's  romanticism  is  thor 
oughly  realistic,  and  with  whatever  modification  due 
to  the  sex  of  its  subjects,  thoroughly  substantial  and 
robust. 

VII 

There  is  one  aspect  of  his  contribution  to  literature 
that  makes  American  neglect  of  Cooper's  merits  and 
his  fame  incomprehensible  on  any  creditable  grounds. 
That  aspect  is  as  varied  as  it  is  salient,  but  from  its 
every  facet  is  reflected  the  rational  aggrandizement  of 
America.  Quite  aside  from  the  service  to  his  country 

49 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

involved  in  the  fact  itself  of  his  foreign  literary  popu 
larity — greater  than  that  of  all  other  American  authors 
combined — it  is  to  be  remarked  that  the  patriotic  is  as 
prominent  as  any  other  element  of  his  work.  To  him, 
to  be  sure,  we  owe  it  that  immediately  on  his  discovery, 
the  European  world  set  an  American  author  among  the 
classics  of  its  own  imaginative  literature;  through  him 
to  this  world  not  only  American  native  treasures  of 
romance,  but  distinctively  American  traits,  ideas  and 
habits,  moral,  social,  and  political,  were  made  known 
and  familiar.  He  first  painted  for  Europe  the  portrait 
of  America.  And  the  fact  that  it  is  in  this  likeness  that 
the  country  is  still  so  generally  conceived  there  eloquently 
attests  the  power  with  which  it  was  executed.  The 
great  changes  that  time  has  wrought  in  its  lineaments 
have  found  no  hand  to  depict  them  vigorously  enough — 
at  least  in  fiction — to  secure  the  substitution  of  a  later 
presentment  for  Cooper's.  But  in  speaking  of  the 
patriotic  element  in  his  work,  I  refer  only  indirectly  to 
its  service  in  exalting  American  literature  in  European 
eyes  and  acquainting  European  minds  with  American 
character.  Mainly  I  wish  to  signalize — what  indirectly 
this  proceeds  from — the  truth  that  in  a  large  sense  the 
subject  of  Cooper's  entire  work  is  America,  nothing 
more,  nothing  less. 

The  substance  of  it,  of  course,  is,  materially  speaking, 
preponderantly  American.  But  what  I  mean  is  that 
even  when  he  was  writing  such  books  as  "The  Bravo," 
"The  Headsman,"  and  "The  Heidenmauer,"  he  was 
distinctly  thinking  about  his  own  country  as  well  as  his 

50 


COOPER 

more  immediate  theme.  In  each  of  these  novels  the 
theme  is  really  democracy.  The  fact  has  been  made  a 
reproach  to  him,  and  charged  with  the  assumed  "in 
artistic"  intrusion  of  preachment  into  his  romance. 
Doubtless  a  picture  of  Venice  at  the  time  when  her  sin 
ister  oligarchy  was  most  despotic  painted  by  a  pure 
literary  artist  like  Theophile  Gautier,  for  example, 
might  be  spectacularly  more  "fetching."  Cooper's,  how 
ever,  has  the  merit  of  being  significant.  One  gets  a 
little  tired  of  the  fetich  of  art,  which  is,  nowadays, 
brought  out  of  its  shrine  on  so  many  occasions  and  ven 
erated  with  such  articulate  inveteracy.  Art  in  any 
other  sense  than  that  of  a  sound  and  agreeable  way  of 
doing  things  in  accordance  with  their  own  law  might 
sometimes,  one  impatiently  reflects,  be  left  to  itself,  to 
its  practitioners,  and  to  the  metaphysicians.  One  may 
wish  incidentally  there  were  more  of  it!  But  to  re 
proach  such  a  work  as  "The  Bravo"  with  a  quality  that 
secures  its  effectiveness  is  not  at  all  credibly  to  assert 
that  it  would  have  been  a  masterpiece  of  pure  beauty 
had  it  lacked  this  quality.  As  it  is,  it  is  an  extremely 
good  story  made  an  extremely  effective  one  by  the  fact 
that  Cooper's  democracy  gave  him  a  point  of  view  from 
which  the  mockery  styled  the  Republic  of  Venice  ap 
peared  in  a  particularly  striking  light.  These  novels 
show  at  any  rate  how  good  a  democrat  Cooper  was, 
how  firmly  grounded  were  his  democratic  principles, 
how  sincere  were  his  democratic  convictions.  They 
show  him  also  as  an  American  democrat — believing 
in  law  as  well  as  liberty,  that  is  to  say — and  not  in  the 

51 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

least  a  visionary.  The  preface  alone  of  "The  Heads 
man"  demonstrates  the  intelligent  enthusiasm  with 
which  he  held  his  social  and  political  creed.  Europe, 
which  nevertheless  he  thoroughly  appreciated,  did  not 
disorient  him.  Nor  on  his  return,  whatever  may  su 
perficially  be  inferred  from  his  splenetic  expressions  of 
disgust  with  its  defects,  did  his  own  country  disillusion 
ize  him. 

The  undoubted  aristocratic  blend  of  his  temperament 
and  his  traditions  did  not  in  the  least  conflict  with  his 
democracy,  his  Americanism.  There  is  nothing  a 
priori  inconsistent  in  the  holding  of  democratic  con 
victions  by  the  most  aristocratic  natures.  The  history 
of  all  religions,  for  example,  is  conclusive  as  to  this; 
and  from  Pericles  to  the  Gracchi,  from  Montaigne  to 
Emerson,  the  phenomenon  is  common  enough  in  politics 
and  philosophy  as  well.  Nor  are  Cooper's  later  Amer 
ican  books  a  posteriori  evidence  of  his  defection.  The 
excuses  and  perversions,  the  faults,  and  even  the  eccen 
tricities  of  democracy,  and  the  way  in  which  these  were 
illustrated  by  the  democracy  of  his  day,  are  certainly 
castigated — caricatured  on  occasion — with  vigor,  with 
zest,  with  temper,  indeed.  But  the  wounds  are  the  faith 
ful  ones  of  a  friend— an  extremely  candid  friend,  of 
course — in  a  period  of  American  evolution  when  candor 
of  the  kind  was  apt  to  be  confounded  with  censure.  His 
candor,  however,  was  merely  the  measure  of  his  dis 
crimination.  His  censure  is  always  delivered  from  a 
patriotic  stand-point.  The  thirigs,  the  traits,  he  satirizes 
and  denounces  are  in  his  view  the  excrescences  of  de- 

52 


COOPER 

mocracy,  and  infuriate  him  as  perversions,  not  as  in 
herent  evils.  There  is  not  the  remotest  trace  of  the 
snob  in  him.  His  often  trivial  and  sometimes  absurd 
excursions  into  the  fields  of  etiquette  and  etymology, 
his  rating  of  his  countrymen  for  their  minor  crudities 
and  fatuities,  are  the  naive,  and  sometimes  elephantine 
endeavors  of  a  patriotic  censor  conscious  of  the  value 
of  elegance  to  precisely  such  a  civilization  as  our  own. 
We  can  see  readily  enough  to-day  that  it  is  calumny  to 
attribute  his  democracy  in  Europe  to  pure  idealism,  and 
his  disgust  with  demagogy  after  his  return  to  an  irasci 
bility  that  changed  his  convictions.  The  discriminating 
American — Lowell,  for  a  prominent  example — is  natu 
rally  an  advocate  of  democracy  abroad  and  a  critic  of  it 
at  home.  And  Cooper's  temperament  was  not  more 
irascible  than  his  mind  was  judicial.  There  is,  appar 
ently,  a  native  relation  between  irascibility  and  the 
judicial  quality.  Breadth  of  view,  unless  it  is  com 
bined  with  the  indifference  of  the  dilettante,  is  naturally 
impatient  of  narrowness. 

Defects  of  temper,  at  all  events,  which  were  conspicu 
ous  in  Cooper,  certainly  coexisted  with  a  fair-mindedness 
equally  characteristic.  Not  a  great,  he  was  distinctly 
a  large,  man  in  all  intellectual  respects.  Professor 
Trent  in  his  "History  of  American  Literature"  re 
curs  to  this  central  trait  again  and  again,  one  is  glad 
to  note,  in  his  exceptionally  appreciative  characteriza 
tion.  He  was  peppery,  but  not  petulant,  iracund  with 
out  truculence.  His  quarrels  with  his  encroaching 
Cooperstown  neighbors,  and  with  the  unspeakable 

53 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

press  of  his  day,  undoubtedly  lacked  dignity,  but  in  all 
cases  he  was  in  the  right,  and  his  outraged  sense  of  jus 
tice  was  at  the  bottom  of  his  violence.  And  his  fair- 
mindedness  so  penetrated  his  patriotism  as  to  render  it 
notably  intelligent,  and  therefore  beneficent.  In  his  day 
intelligent  patriotism  was  not  thorough-going  enough  to 
be  popular.  Partisanship  was  exacted.  The  detach 
ment  which  Cooper  owed  to  his  experience  and  judicial- 
mindedness  was  simply  not  understood.  It  seemed 
necessarily  inconsistent  with  patriotic  feeling.  Such 
scepticism  is,  in  fact,  not  unknown  in  our  own  time! 
But  in  Cooper's,  appreciation  of  foreign,  and  criticism 
of  native,  traits  was  in  itself  almost  universally  suspect. 
Yet  such  candor  as  his  in  noting  excellence  in  men  and 
things  of  other  nations  and  civilizations  is  even  nowa 
days  rarely  to  be  encountered.  France,  Italy,  England, 
the  Irish,  Swiss,  Germans — every  nationality,  in  fact, 
that  figures  in  his  pages — are  depicted  with  absolute 
sympathy  and  lack  of  prejudice.  In  "  Jack  Tier,"  writ 
ten  during  the  Mexican  War,  the  Mexican  character 
at  its  best  is  incarnated  in  the  most  polished  and  high- 
minded,  the  most  refined  and  least  vulgar  of  person 
alities.  In  the  matter  of  national  traits  it  is  still  more 
or  less  true  that,  as  Stendhal  observed,  "la  diffe 
rence  fait  la  haine";  but  to  no  writer  of  the  English 
tongue  at  all  events,  even  since  his  time,  could  the  re 
proach  be  addressed  with  less  reason  than  to  Cooper. 
"Wing-and-Wing"  is  a  text-book  of  true  cosmopoli 
tanism,  and  "Wyandotte"  a  lesson  in  non-partisanship 
at  home. 

54 


COOPER 

No  doubt  it  is  only  logical  to  be  cosmopolitan  and 
liberal  when  one  is  lecturing  one's  countrymen  on  their 
narrowness  and  provinciality.  But  the  disposition  to 
lecture  them  on  this  particular  theme  itself  witnesses 
Cooper's  genuine  fair-mindedness  and  his  desire  to  com 
municate  it  to  his  readers.  Moreover,  the  quality  ap 
pears  in  his  writings  quite  as  often  instinctively  as 
expressly;  it  pervades  their  purely  artistic  as  well  as 
their  didactic  portions.  And  there  are  two  manifesta 
tions  of  it  that  are  particularly  piquant  and  certainly  to 
be  reckoned  among  Cooper's  patriotic  services.  One 
is  his  treatment  of  New  England,  and  the  other  that  of 
the  Protestant  "sects"  as  distinguished  from  the  Epis 
copal  "Church." 

Upon  the  New  England  of  his  day  Cooper  turned  the 
vision  of  a  writer  who  was  also  a  man  of  the  world — a 
product  of  civilization  at  that  time  extremely  rare 
within  its  borders.  He  was  himself  an  eminent  example 
of  what  used  to  be  called  in  somewhat  esoteric  eulogy 
by  those  who  admired  the  type,  a  conservative,  and 
New  England  was  the  paradise  of  the  radical,  the  vision 
ary,  the  doctrinaire.  He  had  no  disposition,  accord 
ingly,  to  view  it  with  a  friendly  eye  or  to  pass  by  any 
of  its  imperfections.  The  narrowness,  the  fanaticism, 
the  absurd  self-sufficiency  and  shallowness,  the  contempt 
for  the  rest  of  the  country,  the  defects  of  the  great 
New  England  qualities  of  thrift  and  self-reliance  char 
acteristic  of  the  section,  were  particularly  salient  to 
him,  and  to  signalize  them  was  irresistible  to  an  eman 
cipated  observer  who  could  contemplate  them  from  a 

55 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

detached  stand-point.  It  would  be  idle  to  pretend 
that  he  interpreted  New  England  types  with  the  inti 
mate  appreciation  of  Hawthorne.  On  the  other  hand, 
his  detachment  being  more  complete,  his  portrayal  of 
them  often  gives  them  the  relief  which  can  only  be 
brought  out  by  the  colorless  white  light  of  cold  im 
partiality.  Occasionally,  without  doubt,  he  satirizes 
rather  than  depicts  them — though  more  rarely  than 
his  heavy  touch  leads  the  reader  to  imagine.  But 
from  "  Wing-and-Wing"  to  "Satanstoe"  the  New  Eng 
land  contingent  of  his  company  of  characters  is  por 
trayed  with  a  searching  and  self-justifying  veracity,  at 
least  as  to  its  essential  features;  and,  as  was  his  habit, 
discriminatingly  portrayed.  Ithuel  Bolt  is  certainly 
one  of  the  notable  characters  of  fiction,  and  yet  he 
could  no  more  have  been  born  and  developed  outside 
of  New  England  than  Leatherstocking  could  have 
hailed  from  Massachusetts.  If  the  Rev.  Meek  Wolfe 
in  "The  Wept  of  Wish-ton- Wish "  is  a  caricature,  he  is 
fully  offset  by  the  fine  portrait  of  the  Puritan  head  of 
the  household. 

It  is  difficult  now  to  recall  the  New  England  of 
Cooper's  day.  Never,  perhaps,  in  the  world's  history 
was  so  much  and  so  wide-spread  mental  activity  so  in 
timately  associated  with  such  extreme  provinciality. 
For  a  miniature  portrait  of  it  consult  the  first  pages  of 
Lowell's  essay  on  Thoreau.  At  present  we  need  to 
have  the  eminence  of  the  section  recalled  to  us.  Pro 
fessor  Barrett  Wendell's  engaging  "Literary  History," 
in  which  he  not  only  limits  American  literature  of 

56 


COOPER 

much  value  to  New  England,  but  even  tucks  it  into  the 
confines  of  Harvard  College,  is  an  interesting  reminder 
of  days  that  seem  curiously  distant.  Between  1825  and 
1850,  at  all  events,  New  England,  always  the  apex,  had 
become  also  the  incubus  of  our  civilization,  and  called 
loudly  for  the  note-taking  of  a  chiel  from  beyond  its 
borders.  Cooper  performed  that  service.  And,  as  I 
say,  it  is  to  be  counted  to  him  for  patriotism.  To  him 
we  owe  it  that  not  only  American  authorship  but  Ameri 
can  literature  has  been  from  his  day  of  national  rather 
than  sectional  character.  The  world  he  represented  to 
the  Europe  of  his  day  was  a  comprehensively  Ameri 
can  world,  and  the  country  as  a  whole,  with  the  there 
tofore  false  proportion  of  its  different  sections  duly 
rectified,  first  appeared  in  effective  presentation  in  the 
domain  of  art. 

His  analogous  hostility  to  ecclesiastical  sectarianism 
was,  perhaps,  a  corollary  of  his  view  of  the  New  Eng 
land  whence  largely  this  sectarianism  came.  English 
non-conformity  transplanted  added  to  its  own  defects 
those  inseparable  from  an  establishment,  which  prac 
tically  it  enjoyed.  Its  contentiousness  became  tyran 
nous,  and  its  virtual  establishment,  destitute  of 
traditions,  served  mainly  to  crystallize  its  crudities. 
Cooper's  episcopalianism  was  in  a  doctrinal  sense, 
no  doubt,  equally  narrow.  And  his  piety  was  strongly 
tinctured  with  dogma.  Some  of  his  polemic  is  absurd, 
and  when  he  is  absurd  he  is  so  to  a  degree  only 
accounted  for  by  his  absolute  indifference  to  appear 
ing  ridiculous.  "The  Crater"  is  an  extraordinary 

57 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

exhibition  of  denominational  fatuity.  But  in  his  day 
his  churchmanship  gave  him  in  religious  matters  the 
same  advantage  of  detachment  that  his  treatment  of 
New  England  enjoyed.  It  gave  him  a  standard  of  taste, 
of  measure,  of  decorum,  of  deference  to  tradition  and 
custom,  and  made  him  a  useful  and  unsparing  critic  of 
the  rawness  and  irresponsibility  so  rife  around  him,  in  a 
field  of  considerably  more  important  mundane  concern 
to  the  community  of  that  time  than — owing  largely  to  its 
own  transformation — it  has  since  become.  He  knew 
the  difference  in  the  ecclesiastical  field,  as  few  in  his  day 
did,  between  "a  reading  from  Milton  and  a  reading 
from  Eliza  Cook."  The  intellectual  mediocrity  of  the 
Episcopal  pulpit  did  not  blind  him,  as  it  did  others,  to 
"the  Church's"  distinctive  superiorities,  secular  and 
religious.  A  ritual,  a  clergy  (however  triturate  as  a 
hierarchy),  a  sense  of  historic  continuity,  the  possession 
of  traditions,  the  spirit  of  conformity  in  lieu  of  self- 
assertion  (a  spirit  so  necessary  to  "the  communion  of 
saints"),  set  off  the  "Churchmen"  of  that  day  some 
what  sharply  from  the  immensely  larger  part  of  their 
respective  societies.  And  Cooper's  criticism  of  the 
more  unlovely  traits  of  the  descendants  of  the  Puritans 
and  the  Scotch-Irish  immigration  on  the  whole  made  for 
an  ideal  which,  socially  considered,  must  be  regarded  as 
superior  to  that  he  found  defective.  His  "conserva 
tive"  spirit,  in  a  word,  enabled  him  to  perform  a  genuine 
and  patriotic  service  to  our  civilization  in  this  respect,  as 
it  did  in  the  case  of  its  portrayal  of  New  England  types 
of  character.  And  as  in  the  latter  case  he  is  not  to  be 

58 


COOPER 

charged  with  a  provinciality  equivalent  to  that  which  he 
exposed,  but  really  judges  it  from  an  open-minded  and 
cosmopolitan  stand-point,  so,  too — though  naturally  in 
a  distinctly  lesser  degree,  in  consequence  of  his  own 
ecclesiastical  and  theological  rigidities — he  exhibits  the 
defectiveness  of  American  non-conformity  from  a  dis 
tinctly  higher  plane  than  its  own.  The  proof  of  this 
and  of  his  large  tolerance  in  religious  matters — where 
his  controversial  spirit  is  not  aroused — is  the  fact  that 
Catholicism  and  Catholics  always  receive  just  and  ap 
preciative  treatment  at  his  hands.  Even  atheism  itself 
he  treats  with  perfect  and  comprehending  appreciation. 
In  this  respect  the  scene  in  "  Wing-and-Wing "  where 
Raoul  Yvard  is  about  to  be  executed  as  a  spy  forms  a 
striking  contrast  to  the  somewhat  analogous  one  in 
"Quentin  Durward,"  where  Scott  uses  the  death  of  the 
unbelieving  Hayraddin  Mograbin  to  point  a  series  of 
perfunctory  commonplaces. 

I  come  back  in  conclusion  to  Professor  Trent's 
epithet.  Cooper's  was  above  all  a  large  nature.  Even 
his  littlenesses  were  those  of  a  large  nature.  Let  us 
refine  and  scrutinize,  hesitate  and  distinguish,  when  we 
have  corresponding  material  to  consider.  But  in  con 
sidering  Cooper's  massive  and  opulent  work  it  is  inex 
cusable  to  obscure  one's  vision  of  the  forest  by  a  study 
of  the  trees.  His  work  is  in  no  sense  a  jardin  des  plantes; 
it  is  like  the  woods  and  sea  that  mainly  form  its  subject 
and  substance.  Only  critical  myopia  can  be  blind  to  the 
magnificent  forest,  with  its  pioneer  clearings,  its  fringe 
of  "settlements,"  its  wood-embosomed  lakes,  its  neigh- 

59 


.^:.y.:.: •.-:•   :..  ~-i  ::.-_.-7i?.5 


HAWTHORNE 


HAWTHORNE 

I 

HAWTHORNE  was  so  exceptional  a  writer  that  he  has 
very  generally  been  esteemed  a  great  one.  In  America 
such  an  estimate  has  been  almost  universal.  He  won 
his  way  slowly,  but  his  first  solid  achievement  met  with 
ready  appreciation  and  thenceforward  fame  awaited  his 
subsequent,  and  retroactively  rewarded  his  earlier,  per 
formances.  We  stood  in  much  need  of  great  writers 
at  the  time;  and,  though  our  literary  pantheon  is  now 
more  populous,  it  would  occur  to  no  one,  probably,  to 
displace  his  figure  from  the  niche  where  it  was  speedily 
installed,  and  where  even  a  lesser  one  would  have  been 
welcome.  His  works  never  having  been  supplanted 
among  us,  it  is  hardly  surprising  that  with  us  they  stand 
where  they  did.  Comparisons  are  in  their  favor.  They  *  Vy  .  ^/] 
are  thoroughly  original,  quite  without  literary  deriva-  j 
tion  upon  which  much  of  our  literature  leans  with  such  \  i 

deferential  complacence.  Even  the  theme  of  many  of  jJ/vvul^j 
them — the  romance  of  Puritan  New  England — was 
Hawthorne's  discovery.  They  are  works  of  pure  litera 
ture  and  therefore  in  a  field  where  competition  is  not 
numerous.  They  altogether  eschew  the  ordinary,  the 
literal,  and  they  have  the  element  of  spiritual  distinction, 

63 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

which  still  further  narrows  their  eminence  and  gives 
them  still  greater  relief.  Withal  they  are  extremely 
characteristic,  extremely  personal.  They  represent,  one 
and  all,  their  author  and  no  one  but  their  author,  whom, 
therefore,  they  have  the  effect  of  making  a  very  precise, 
a  very  definite  figure.  He  was  himself  a  very  definite, 
even  a  unique,  figure  and  one  that  harmonized  obviously 
— or  to  employ  the  prevailing  tone  of  Hawthorne  criti 
cism,  exquisitely  and  beautifully — with  their  exceptional 
quality.  He  unquestionably  dwelt  apart,  and  partly, 
perhaps,  for  this  reason  his  soul  was  generally  believed 
to  be  like  a  star.  At  the  same  time  there  is  nothing 
eccentric,  no  excess,  in  his  genius  to  disintegrate  his  en 
during  reputation  with  the  alloy  of  the  transient  and  the 
meretricious.  His  writings  satisfy  academic  standards 
appeal  to  the  conservatism  of  culture.  And  their 
yle,  clear,  chaste,  and  correct,  is  of  the  preservative 
Border.  They  form  a  large  constituent  portion  of  our 
classics — our  somewhat  slender  sheaf  of  truly  classic 
production.  As  such  they  are  read — more  precisely, 
have  been  read — by  everybody.  Up  to  the  present  time 
at  least  they  have  been  universally  part  of  the  "required 
reading,"  so  to  speak,  of  youth  and  the  recollection  of 
eld — a  recollection  always  roseate  if  afforded  half  a 
chance,  and  in  Hawthorne's  case,  one  suspects,  enjoy 
ing  practical  immunity  from  the  readjustments  and 
rectification  of  later  re-reading. 

On  the  whole,  Hawthorne  and  his  country  are  quits. 
If  he  enriched  its  literary  treasure  and  contributed  gen 
erously  to  its  literary  glory,  as  incontestably  he  did,  it 

64 


HAWTHORNE 

furnished  him  with  both  a  comparatively  clear  field  for 
the  exercise,  and  a  comparatively  undistracting  back 
ground  for  the  exhibition,  of  his  genius.  In  no  litera 
ture  would  his  works  have  been  unobserved  or  even 
obscured  by  competition.  But,  as  contributions  to  Ameri 
can  literature  they  have  abroad  undoubtedly  achieved 
success  by  an  ampler  margin,  and  have  at  home  been 
awarded  an  importance  commensurate  with  their  origi 
nality.  Hitherto,  at  all  events,  among  ourselves  their 
lack  of  substance  has  been  deemed  a  quality  instead  of 
a  defect  and,  indeed,  their  "airy  and  charming  insub- 
stantiality"  their  chief  title  to  fame.  We  have  had  so 
few  poets!  The  temptation  has  been  great  to  eke  out 
the  roll  with  Hawthorne,  and,  sometimes,  not  to  mince 
matters,  to  call  him  the  greatest  of  them  all.  "The 
rarest  creative  imagination  of  the  century,  the  rarest 
in  some  ideal  respects  since  Shakespeare,"  says  Lowell 
in  his  hearty  wholesale  way.  We  shall  see  as  time 
passes.  But  one  thing  is  certain.  If  Hawthorne's  im 
portance  is  to  remain  at  its  present  evaluation  it  will 
not  be  because  of  his  "insubstantiality."  It  will  be,  as 
it  is  in  the  case  of  every  writer  who  makes  no  sensuous 
appeal,  because  of  the  amount  and  quality  of  significant;! 
truth  effectively  expressed  in  his  writings.  \ 


This  was  not  quite  his  own  view,  it  may  be  said. 
And  what  his  own  view  was  he  made  perfectly  plain. 
Though  not  an  expansive,  Hawthorne's  was  a  perfectly 

65 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

candid  nature.  A  recluse  in  life,  he  overflows  to  the 
reader.  He  does  not  tell  very  much,  but  apparently 
he  tells  everything.  His  confidences  are  not  ample. 
Nothing  is  ample  in  his  writings  but  the  plethora  of 
detail  and  the  fulness  of  fancies.  But  he  has  no  reti 
cences.  If  he  communicates  little,  he  has  nothing  to 
conceal.  He  discourses  of  his  stories,  of  their  particular 
genre,  with  admirable  good  sense  and  is  very  far  from 
overvaluing  them;  of  the  kind  of  man  he  is,  without 
coquetry  or  other  self-consciousness.  He  is,  however, 
passably  complacent,  at  least  in  the  sense  that  resigna 
tion  is  complacent.  He  is  never  dissatisfied.  He  does 
not  strive  or  cry,  or  emulate  or  regret.  He  would  gladly 
be  more  popular  if  he  could,  but,  like  Luther,  he  can  do 
no  other.  Not  that  he  blames  the  public  in  the  least. 
He  "rather  wonders  how  the  ' Twice-Told  Tales'  should 
have  gained  what  vogue  they  did  than  that  it  was  so 
little  and  so  gradual."  He  is  a  little  perverse  about  his 
talent  at  times.  He  half  wishes  it  were  not  so  gloomy, 
but  feels  that  it  is  irremediable,  that  he  is  under  the  spell 
of  a  rather  mournful  and  melancholy  inspiration.  He 
finds  his  things  lack  sunlight,  that  they  in  a  sort  turn  out 
that  way  without  his  co-operation.  One  of  the  most 
naive  performances  in  literature  is  due  to  this  feeling. 
He  writes  an  altogether  inapt  introduction  to  his  one 
masterpiece  to  relieve  and  lighten  its  dark  tone — in 
which  it  wholly  fails,  since  it  has  nothing  to  do  with  the 
story,  and  in  which,  if  successful,  it  would  have  been 
calamitous.  But  at  heart  he  is  altogether  reconciled 
to  his  moonlight  shadows  and  low  tones.  It  is  only  in 

66 


HAWTHORNE 

the  interest  of  the  public  that  he  laments  them.  He 
looks  upon  "The  Scarlet  Letter"  as  a  "volume,"  not  as 
a  production.  It  needs  piecing  out,  being  scant,  being 
in  short  a  longer  "Twice-Told  Tale."  Hence  the 
"Custom  House"  prologue — a  graceful,  pleasant,  not 
very  genial  essay  which  used  to  be  thought  a  marvel 
quite  eclipsing  "Elia,"  and  which  he  designs  to  secure 
the  balance  as  well  as  increase  the  bulk  of  a  story  other 
wise  slight  and  sombre  considered  as  a  volume.  He 
paid  off  some  old  scores  in  the  process.  Otherwise,  it  is 
doubtful  if  he  would  have  had  the  zest  to  make  the 
requisite  effort.  He  could  not  be  made  to  take  any  of 
it  back.  He  was  as  implacable  as  he  was  upright,  and 
as  unyielding  as  he  was  straightforward.  He  made  very 
little  effort  of  any  kind.  His  industry  was  measurably 
constant,  but  rather  of  the  routine  order.  He  wrote  his 
fiction  much  as  he  wrote  his  interminable  note-books,  •»  . , 
without  exaltation,  without  heat,  without  noteworthy  (&i  ^  il)^ 
struggle.  He  took  great  pains  but  with  great  placidity.  ^ 
It  is  significant  that  the  only  exception  is  the  writing  of 
his  only  chef-d'ceuvre.  When  he  wrote  "The  Scarlet 
Letter"  he  shut  himself  up  and  wrestled  continuously 
with  the  angel  of  his  inspiration  till  he  had  conquered. 
Whereupon,  somewhat  relieved,  no  doubt,  he  resumed 
his  habitual  serenity  and  comfortably  relaxed  into  the 
more  congenial  function  of  characterizing  the  types  and 
curios  of  his  custom-house  experience.  Tension  was  as  j 
foreign  to  him  as  expansion.  In  the  prologue  he  seems ! 
to  have  returned  from  an  excursion  into  the  realm  of 
energy  and  effort,  of  artistic  endeavor,  and  to  have 

67 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

settled  down  once  more  in  the  region  of  old  manses 
and  twice-told  tales  where  he  was  completely,  even 
radiantly,  domesticated. 

It  is  in  a  sense  tragic  that  he  should  have  had  so 
little  vocation.  Emerson  makes  the  same  complaint  of 
Thoreau — content,  he  deplores,  to  be  the  captain  of  a 
huckleberry  party.  All  one  can  say  is  that  with  more 
vocation  Hawthorne  would  not  have  been  Hawthorne, 
who  is  as  indisputably  the  author  of  his  other  works  as 
of  "The  Scarlet  Letter."  The  preface  to  the  "Twice- 
Told  Tales,"  in  which  and  in  the  "Mosses  from  an  Old 
Manse  "  he  felt  his  way  to  his  larger  fiction,  is,  in  the 
main,  an  admirable  piece  of  self-characterization,  much 
of  it  as  applicable  to  his  entire  work  as  to  these  unpre 
tending  stories.  It  contains  three  especially  significant 
sentences.  "The  sketches  are  not,"  he  says,  "it  is 
hardly  necessary  to  say,  profound,  but  it  is  rather  more 
remarkable  that  they  so  seldom,  if  ever,  show  any  design 
on  the  writer's  part  to  make  them  so."  Again,  they  "are 
not  the  talk  of  a  secluded  man  with  his  own  mind  and 
heart  (had  it  been  so  they  could  hardly  have  failed  to  be 
more  deeply  and  permanently  valuable),  but  his  attempts, 
and  very  imperfectly  successful  ones,  to  open  an  inter 
course  with  the  world."  And,  finally,  in  words  that  go 
to  the  root  of  the  matter:  "Whether  from  lack  of  power, 
or  an  unconquerable  reserve,  the  Author's  touches  have 
often  an  effect  of  tameness." 

Now  it  is  evident  that  intercourse  with  the  world  is 
not  opened  on  these  terms.  The  world  assumes  that 
the  recluse  issuing  from  his  seclusion  should  bring  with 

68 


HAWTHORNE 

him  his  warrant  for  dwelling  in  it,  should  communicate 
the  result  of  communing  with  his  own  mind  and  heart. 
If  this  result  is  not  profound  or  deeply  and  permanently 
valuable,  it  is  asking  too  much  of  the  heedless  world  to 
ask  it  to  accept  unconquerable  reserve  as  the  reason. 
The  world  is  bound  to  esteem  this  the  best  you  can  do 
and  refuses  to  ascribe  its  lack  of  profundity  merely  to  L^jL 
the — truly  remarkable,  as  you  say — absence  of  any  de 
sign  on  your  part  to  make  it  more  worth  while.  It  may, 
of  course,  be  said  that  a  recluse  is  as  much  entitled  to 
claim  attention  for  trifles  as  any  one  else.  Only,  in  that 
case  his  status  of  recluse  is  immaterial.  And,  plainly, 
Hawthorne  was  not  at  all  disposed  to  consider  it  imma 
terial.  He  thought  it,  as  others  have  done,  the  most 
material  fact  about  both  him  and  his  work,  as  is  plain 
from  his  calling  his  reserve  "unconquerable."  So  that 
it  is  impossible  to  share  his  uncertainty  as  to  whether  the 
tameness  of  his  touches  proceeds  from  this  reserve  or 
from  lack  of  power.  The  answer  clearly  is :  both.  And 
to  go  a  step  further,  and  as  I  say  to  the  root  of  the 
matter,  his  unconquerable  reserve  proceeds  in  all  proba 
bility  from  his  lack  of  power— at  least  of  anything  like 
sustained,  unintermittent  power  that  can  be  relied  upon 
and  evoked  at  will  by  its  possessor. 

Power  at  all  events  is  precisely  the  element  most  con 
spicuously  lacking  in  the  normal  working  of  this  imagi-   / 
nation  which  to  Lowell  recalls  Shakespeare's.    Repeat-  L      i     / 
edly  he  seems  to  be  on  the  point  of  exhibiting  power,  tyi  oA  7 
of  moving  us,  that  is  to  say;    but,  except,  I  think,  in     (tfo 
"The  Scarlet  Letter,"  he  never  quite  does  so.     His  un- 

69 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

conquerable  reserve  steps  in  and  turns  him  aside.  He 
never  crosses  the  line,  never  makes  the  attempt.  He  is 
too  fastidious  to  attempt  vigor  and  fail.  His  intellec 
tual  sensitiveness,  to  which  failure  in  such  an  endeavor 
would  be  acutely  palpable,  prevents  the  essay.  In  the 
instance  of  "The  Scarlet  Letter,"  where  he  does  achieve 
it,  he  does  so  as  it  were  in  spite  of  himself,  and  it  is 
curious  that  he  instinctively  re-establishes  his  normal 
equilibrium  by  failing  to  appreciate  his  achievement. 
At  least  he  prefers  to  it  his  "House  of  the  Seven  Gables." 
He  is  much  more  at  home  in  amusing  himself  than 
in  creating  something.  "I  have  sometimes,"  he  says, 
"produced  a  singular  and  not  unpleasing  effect,  so  far 
as  my  own  mind  was  concerned,  by  imagining  a  train 
of  incidents  in  which  the  spirit  and  mechanism  of  the 
fairy  legend  should  be  combined  with  the  characters  and 
manners  of  familiar  life."  He  was  content  if  his  effect 
was  pleasing  so  far  as  his  own  mind  was  concerned. 
And  his  own  mind  was  easily  pleased  with  the  kind  of 
process  he  describes.  That  is,  he  follows  his  tempera- 

tyfl*'     mental  bent  with  tranquil  docility  instead  of  compelling 
Cw   '  \jh     fr  to  serve  him  in  the  construction  of  some  fabric  of 

\^  ,\  •  importance.  The  latter  business  demands  energy  and 
effort.  And  if  he  made  so  little  effort  it  is  undoubtedly 
because  he  had  so  little  energy.  His  genius  was  a  re 
flective  one.  He  loved  to  muse.  Reverie  was  a  state  of 
mind  which  he  both  indulged  and  applauded,  and  there 
can  hardly  be  a  more  barren  one  for  the  production  of 
anything  more  significant  than  conceits  and  fancies. 
Reality  repelled  him.  What  attracted  him  was  mirage. 

70 


HAWTHORNE 

Mirage  is  his  specific  aim,  the  explicit  goal  of  his  art — 
which  thus  becomes  inevitably  rather  artistry  than  art. 
His  practice  is  sustained  by  his  theory.  Speaking  of  a 
scene  mirrored  in  a  river  he  exclaims,  "Which,  after  all, 
was  the  most  real— the  picture  or  the  original  ?— the 
objects  palpable  to  our  grosser  senses,  or  their  apotheosis 
in  the  stream  beneath  ?  Surely  the  disembodied  images 
stand  in  closer  relation  to  the  soul."  If  this  were  a 
figure  expressive  of  the  mirroring  of  nature  by  art  it 
would  be  a  happy  one,  though  not  convincing  to  those 
who  believe  that  the  artistic  synthesis  of  nature  should  I 
be  more  rather  than  less  definite  than  its  material.  But, 
it  is  not  a  figure.  It  is  a  statement  of  Hawthorne's 
preference  for  the  vague  and  the  undefined  in  nature 
itself  as  nearer  to  the  soul.  Nearer  to  the  soul  of  the 
poet  it  may  be,  not  to  that  of  the  artist.  The  most 
idealizing  artist  can  count  on  enough  vagueness  of  his 
own — whether  it  handicap  his  effort  or  illumine  his 
result  in  dealing  with  his  material.  And  it  is  not  near 
to  the  soul  of  the  poet  endowed  with  the  architectonic 
faculty— the  poet  in  the  Greek  sense,  the  maker.  It  is 
the  congenial  content  of  contemplation  indeterminate 
and  undirected. 

The  contemplative  mind,  the  contemplative  mood, 
are  above  all  hospitable  to  fancy,  and  in  fancy  Haw- 
thorne's  mind  and  mood  were  wonderfully  rich.  He' 
had  but  to  follow  its  beckoning  and42jrusi  himself  to 
its  guidance  to  make  a  pretty  satisfactory  journey,  at 
least  so  far  as  his  own  mind  was  concerned.  He  speaks, 
to  be  sure,  of  "setting  fancy  resolutely  to  work,"  but  I 

71 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

think  he  must  have  referred  to  continued  rather  than  to 
arduous  labor.  A  certain  degree  of  indolence  must  have 
been  allied  with  his  indifference,  as  the  beginnings  of 
his  career,  somewhat  hesitant  and  tentative,  indicate. 
Once  started,  however,  most  of  the  undertakings  that 
mark  it  must  have  proceeded  with  the  same  absence  of 
friction  as  his  career  itself.  Those  occasions  on  which 
his  fancy  may  be  said  to  have  worked  resolutely  are 
probably  those  in  which  it  functioned  regularly  and  in 
somewhat  routine  fashion,  as,  for  example,  those  "  com 
positions,"  as  they  may  be  called  in  quite  the  school-boy 
sense,  in  which  he  seemed  to  give  himself  a  theme  and 
proceed  to  set  down  all  he  could  "  think  up  "  about  it — 
"Sights  from  a  Steeple,"  "A  Rill  from  the  Town  Pump," 
"Little  Annie's  Ramble,"  and  a  number  of  similar 
sketches  consonant  with  the  "in  lighter  vein"  text  of 
school  "readers,"  and  very  popular  in  their  day.  In 
general,  one  imagines  he  did  not  have  to  set  fancy  reso 
lutely  to  work,  but  merely  to  give  it  free  play.  The  re 
sult  was  amazingly  productive.  How  many  "Mosses" 
and  "  Twice-Told  Tales"  are  there?  Certainly  a  pro 
digious  number  when  one  considers  the  narrowness  of 
their  range  and  their  extraordinary  variety  within  it. 
Their  quality  is  singularly  even,  I  think.  Some  of 
them — a  few — are  better  than  others,  but  mainly  in 
more  successfully  illustrating  their  common  quality. 
What  this  is  Hawthorne  himself  sufficiently  indicates  in 
saying,  "Instead  of  passion  there  is  sentiment;  and  even 
in  what  purport  to  be  pictures  of  actual  life  we  have 
allegory."  But  his  consciousness  of  his  limitations  does 

72 


HAWTHORNE 

not  exorcise  them,  though  his  candor,  which  is  charm 
ing,  wins  our  appreciation  for  their  corresponding  excel 
lences. 

Or,  rather,  no.  It  is  so  absolute  as  to  make  us  feel  a 
little  ungracious  at  our  inability  to  take  quite  his  view 
after  all.  After  all,  it  is  plain  that  he  has  a  paternal 
feeling  for  them  that  it  is  a  little  difficult  to  share.  Sen 
timent  replaces  passion,  it  is  true.  But  the  sentiment 
is  pale  for  sentiment.  It  is  sentiment  insufficiently 
senti.  Allegory,  it  is  true,  replaces  reality,  but  the' 
allegory  itself  is  insufficiently  real.  The  tales  are  not; 
merely  in  a  less  effective,  less  robust,  less  substantial 
category  than  that  which  includes  passion  and  actual 
life,  but  within  their  own  category  they  are — most  of 
them — unaccented  and  inconclusive.  They  are  too 
faint  in  color  and  too  frail  in  construction  quite  to 
merit  the  inference  of  Hawthorne's  pretty  deprecation. 
They  have  not  "  the  pale  tint  of  flowers  that  blossomed 
in  too  retired  a  shade."  They  are  hardly  flowers  at  all, 
but  grasses  and  ferns.  And  while  he  exaggerates  in 
saying  that  "if  opened  in  the  sunshine"  they  are  "apt 
to  look  exceedingly  like  a  volume  of  blank  pages,"  he  is 
distinctly  optimistic  in  thinking  that  they  would  gain  ^ 
greatly  by  being  read  "in  the  clear,  brown,  twilight 
atmosphere"  in  which  they  were  written,  and  that  they 
cannot  always  "  be  taken  into  the  reader's  mind  without 
a  shiver."  They  can — always.  There  is  not  a  shiver  ^ 
in  them.  Their  tone  is  lukewarm  and  their  temper 
Laodicean.  Witchery  is  precisely  the  quality  they  sug 
gest  but  do  not  possess.  Their  atmosphere  is  not  that 

73 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

of  the  clear  brown  twilight  in  which  familiar  objects  are 
poetized,  but  that  of  the  gray  day  in  which  they  acquire 
monotone.  The  twilight  and  moonlight,  so  often  fig 
uratively  ascribed  to  Hawthorne's  genius,  are  in  fact 
a  superstition.  There  is  nothing  eerie  or  elfin  about  his 
genius.  He  is  too  much  the  master  of  it  and  directs  it 
with  a  too  voluntary  control.  Fertile  as  it  is,  its  multi 
farious  conceits  and  caprices  are  harnessed  and  handled 
with  the  light,  firm  hand  of  perfect  precision  and  guided 
along  a  level  course  of  extremely  unbroken  country. 
£There  is  no  greater  sanity  to  be  met  with  in  literature 
£than  Hawthorne's.  The  wholesome  constitution  of  his 
mind  is  inveterate  and  presides  with  unintermittent  con 
stancy  in  his  prose.  Now  caprice,  conducted  by  reason, 
infallibly  incurs  the  peril  of  insipidity,  and  it  is  not  to  be 
denied  that  many  of  the  tales  settle  comfortably  into  the 
category  of  the  prosaic. 

Why,  then,  have  they  their  reputation,  and  why  does 
one  feel  a  little  awkward  and  unsympathetic  in  confess 
ing  that  he  finds  them  dull  ?  In  the  first  place  the  fond 
ness  of  the  public  for  them  has  been,  in  strict  history,  an 
acquired  taste.  They  met  with  very  little  favor  at  first. 
The  genial  Longfellow  praised  them  to  deaf  ears.  After 
the  appearance  of  "The  Scarlet  Letter"  readers  turned 
back  to  them  in  appreciative  disposition  and,  as  is 
usually  the  case  under  such  circumstances,  found  or 
fancied  in  them  what  they  looked  for.  But  mainly  they 
won  and  have  kept  their  classic  position,  it  is  not  to  be 
doubted,  because  of  their  originality,  their  refinement, 
and  their  elevation.  There  is  certainly  nothing  else  like 

74 


HAWTHORNE 

them;  their  taste  is  perfect;  and,  in  general,  they  deal 
with  some  phase  of  the  soul,  some  aspect  or  quality  or 
transaction  of  the  spiritual  life.  They  are  the  echoes 
of  no  literary  precedent,  but  as  much  Hawthorne's  own 
as  his  physiognomy.  They  exhibit  a  literary  fastidious 
ness  not  so  much  free  from  as  absolutely  dead  to  the 
manifold  seductions  of  the  meretricious,  a  literary  breed 
ing  so  admirable  as  to  seem  unconscious  of  the  existence 
of  vulgar  expedients.  And  their  informing  purpose  lies 
quite  outside  the  material  world  and  its  sublunary 
phenomena.  No  small  portion  of  their  originality  con 
sists,  indeed,  in  the  association  of  their  refinement  and 
elevation  with  what  we  can  now  see  is  their  mediocrity. 
Elsewhere  in  the  world  of  fiction  mediocrity  is  associated 
with  anything  but  fineness  of  fibre  and  spirituality.  The 
novelty  of  the  combination  in  Hawthorne's  case  was  dis 
concerting,  and  it  is  small  wonder  that  for  a  time  at 
Least — for  a  generation,  no  doubt,  so  gradual  is  the  read 
justment  of  popular  esteem  of  the  unpopular — the  im 
portance  of  the  "Twice-Told  Tales"  and  the  "Mosses" 
was  argued  from  their  distinction.  Finally,  some  of  . 
them— too  few  assuredly— are  good  stories.  *£4 

III 

The  rest  are  sterilized  by  the  evil  eye  of  Allegory  under 
whose  baleful  spell  for  some  reason  or  other  he  early  fell. 
Neither  the  culture  nor  the  criticism  of  his  environment, 
from  which  besides  he  had  as  much  as  possible  separated 
himself,  was  sufficient  to  rectify  the  individual  whim  by 

75 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

the  general  consensus;  and  in  any  case  conformity  to 
aught  but  his  own  traditions,  which  were  conventional 
enough  essentially,  was  as  foreign  to  him  as  was  the 
eccentricity  that  surrounded  him.  Having  elected  the 
service  of  this  insipid  sprite,  there  was  no  influence  to 
turn  him  from  it,  and  he  persisted  with  the  overweening 
obstinacy  of  the  invincibly  modest.  Probably  his  ances 
tral  strain  had  much  to  do  with  this  addiction.  It  was, 
perhaps,  a  compromise  on  his  part  between  his  imagina 
tion  and  his  inheritance.  His  imagination  impelled  him 
to  the  production  of  fiction,  his  Puritanism  restrained 
his  fiction  within  the  confines  of  the  didactic.  At  any 
rate,  he  took  his  bent,  his  pli,  at  the  outset  and  rejoiced 
calmly  and  temperately  in  the  practice  of  this  hybrid 
and  artificial  genre.  It  is  not  to  be  denied  that  he  had 
an  aptitude  for  it.  But  his  aptitude  is  less  than  his 
j  affection,  and  his  devotion  has  something  exasperating 
about  it — the  exasperation  always  aroused  by  the  con 
secration  of  high  powers  to  comparatively  trivial  ends. 
|  Allegory  justifies  itself  when  the  fiction  is  the  fact  and  the 
Lmoral  the  induction.  "Gulliver"  and  "The  Pilgrim's 
Progress,"  for  example.  Bunyan's  imagination  created 
a  world  of  types  so  vividly  presented  as  to  have  the  force 
of  individuals,  provided  them  with  adventures  as  ani 
mating  as  the  incidents  of  romance,  and  enforced  his 
moral  by  giving  an  independent  and  ideal  verisimilitude 
to  its  innocent  and  unconscious  exponents.  "The  Pil 
grim's  Progress"  is  undoubtedly  a  tract,  but  if  it  had 
been  only  a  tract  it  would  never  have  achieved  uni 
versal  canonization.  It  is  the  splendid  panoramic  con- 

76 


HAWTHORNE 


struction  of  a  great  imagination  inspired  by  the  experi 
ence  of  the  soul  in  the  struggle  with  sin.  It  is,  in  a  word, 
a  work  of  art  in  itself,  leaning  lightly — though,  of  course, 
to  all  the  more  purpose — on  its  moral,  as  lightly  as  a 
dream  on  its  interpretation  or  a  vision  on  the  conscious 
concentration  of  the  seer.  Most  persons  probably  read 
"Gulliver"  for  the  story  and  miss  the  satire.  The 
"Divine  Comedy"  and  "Don  Quixote"  and  "Paradise 
Lost"  are  allegories;  JSsop's  "Fables,"  even  "Plu 
tarch's  Lives,"  are  allegories;  history,  conceived  as 
philosophy  teaching  by  example,  is  an  allegory.  So,  in 
a  sense,  Is  all  art.  But  allegory  is  art  only  when  its 
representation  is  as  imaginatively  real  as  its  meaning. 
The  mass  of  allegory — allegory  strictly  devoted  to  ex 
position  and  dependent  upon  exegesis,  allegory  ex 
plicitly  so  called — is  only  incidentally  art  at  all. 

Hawthorne's  is  of  this  order.  His  subject  is  always  1 
something  other  than  its  substance.  Everything  mean's 
something  else.  Dealing  with  the  outer  world  solely  for 
the  sake  of  the  inner,  he  is  careless  of  its  character  and 
often  loses  its  significance  in  mere  suggestiveness.  His 
^eaimgj.sJth£^lHUxleiL_Qf  his  story,  not. Jhe  automatic 
moral  complement  of  its  vivid  and  actual  reality.  Hence 
the  sense  of  reality  is  absent  from  it,  and  for  this  nothing 
will  atone  in  any  form  of  art  where  the  sense  of  unreality 
is  not  sought  instead.  It  is  rather  singular  that  this 
latter  effect  is  one  he  never  sought.  He  never  entered 
fairy-land — except  to  retell  its  classic  tales  in  his 
manuals,  "The  Wonder  Book"  and  "Tanglewood 
Tales,"  which  have  only  a  juvenile  appeal  and  where 

77 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

he  was  not  at  his  happiest,  I  think,  though  the  volumes 
have  his  usual  distinction  and,  measured  by  the  "jour 
neyman-work"  standard,  have  unquestionably  titular 
rank.  His  occasional  effort  for  a  slightly  triturate  effect 
of  reality  is  witnessed  in  the  introduction  to  "The 
Threefold  Destiny,"  in  which  he  says:  "Rather  than  a 
story  of  events  claiming  to  be  real,  it  may  be  considered 
as  an  allegory,  such  as  the  writers  of  the  last  century 
would  have  expressed  in  the  shape  of  an  Eastern  tale, 
but  to  which  I  have  endeavored  to  give  a  more  life-like 
warmth  than  could  be  infused  into  those  fanciful  pro 
ductions."  The  endeavor  can  hardly  be  called  fatuous 
considering  the  comparisons  it  emulates,  but  the  result, 
though  more  concrete  than  usual  with  him,  is  as  usual 
less  life-like  in  its  warmth  than  ingenious  in  its  illustra 
tion  of  its  moral  theme.  In  general,  however,  his  dis 
position  is  disclosed  by  such  a  sentence  as  this  in  the 
"Sketches  from  Memory":  "On  this  theme" — namely 
"the  vain  search  for  an  unearthly  treasure" — "me- 
thinks  I  could  frame  a  tale  with  a  deep  moral."  He  did 
frame  such  a  tale — "The  Great  Carbuncle" — whose 
moral  is  doubtless  deep  to  those  to  whom  all  morals  are 
so,  and  of  which,  at  any  rate,  in  accordance  with  his 
practice  the  moral,  not  the  tale,  is  the  thing. 

His  faculty  of  discovering  morals  on  which  tales 
could  be  framed  is  prodigious.  It  rises  to  the  distinction 
of  a  special  capacity  of  the  mind,  like  the  gift  for  lan 
guages  or  a  genius  for  chess.  It  is,  as  one  may  say,  a 
by-product  of  the  Puritan  preoccupation.  He  did  not 
find  sermons  in  stones.  He  had  the  sermons  already; 

78 


HAWTHORNE 

his  task  was  to  find  the  stones  to  fit  them.  \  And  these 
his  fancy  furnished  him  with  a  fertility  paralleling  his  use 
for  them.  But  his  interest  in  shaping  these  was  con 
centrated  on  their  illustrative  and  not  on  their  real  quali 
ties.  Instead  of  realizing  vividly  and  presenting  con 
cretely  the  elements  of  his  allegory,  he  contented  himself 
with  their  plausibility  as  symbols.  On  this  he  always 
insisted  and  to  compass  it  he  expended  much  ingenuity. 
His  fancy  was  of  the  kind  that  never  completely  loses 
its  hold  of  the  actual.  His  literary  taste  was  too  serious 
to  content  itself  with  pure  mystification.  The  insub- 
stantiality  he  sought  was  to  consist  in  the  envelope,  not 
in  the  object.  He  desired  to  dissemble,  not  to  abjure 
reality.  But  the  sense  of  reality  even  as  a  substructure 
for  fancifulness  is  not  to  be  obtained  merely  by  the  in 
genuity  which  finds  a  possible  scientific  basis  for  what 
performs  its  sole  service  as  apparently  imaginary. 

To  take  a  crude  instance  of  this  oftenest  subtle  prac 
tice:  "Egotism,  or  the  Bosom  Serpent"  is  not,  artistic 
ally  speaking,  made  more  real  by  the  foot-note  that 
explains  the  actual  occurrence  of  the  physical  fact  in 
several  cases.  The  story  as  a  story  stands  or  falls  by  the 
reality  with  which  the  man  with  the  snake  in  his  bosom 
is  presented.  In  the  course  of  this  presentation  the 
victim  exclaims,  "It  gnaws  me!  It  gnaws  me."  "And 
then,"  the  narrator  says,  "there  was  an  audible  hiss, 
but  whether  it  came  from  the  apparent  lunatic's  own 
lips,  or  was  the  real  hiss  of  a  serpent,  might  admit  of 
discussion."  We  are,  of  course,  spared  the  discussion, 
which  might  easily  fail  to  interest  us,  but  the  point  is 

79 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

that  the  suggestion  of  it  is  precisely  one  of  those  touches 
which  diminish  the  sense  of  reality  in  the  presentation, 
and  of  which  Hawthorne  is  so  inordinately  fond.  Here 
it  is  of  small  comparative  importance.  The  same  thing 
is  even  charming,  I  think,  in  the  author's  speculation 
about  Donatello's  possibly  pointed  ears  in  "The  Marble 
Faun,"  though  I  think  also  that  he  greatly  overworks  the 
faun-like  resemblance,  which  apparently  he  cannot  con 
vince  himself  he  has  made  sufficiently  clear,  and  follows 
to  ridiculous  lengths  in  Donatello's  skippings  and  capri- 
olings,  as  well  as  in  his  conformation  and  character. 
But  oftenest  his  intrusion  of  symbolism,  that  parasite  on 
allegory  itself,  is  a  crying  abuse  of  a  perfectly  superficial 
and  trivial  expedient.  He  was,  in  fact,  allegory-mad. 
.  Allegory  was  his  obsession.  Consequently,  he  not  only 
fails  to  handle  the  form  in  the  minimizing  manner  of  the 
masters,  but  often  fails  in  effectiveness  on  the  lower 
plane  where  the  moral  occupies  the  foreground.  "The 
Birthmark"  is  an  instance.  Nothing  could  be  finer  than 
the  moral  of  this  tale,  which  inculcates  the  fatal  error  of 
insisting  on  absolute  perfection  in  what  one  loves  most 
absolutely.  But  it  is  a  moral  even  more  obscurely 
brought  out  than  it  is  fantastically  symbolized.  In  the 
same  way,  the  moral  of  "Rappacini's  Daughter,"  dis 
tinctly  the  richest  and  warmest  of  Hawthorne's  produc 
tions,  is  still  less  effectively  enforced.  It  is  quite  lost 
sight  of  in  the  development  of  the  narrative,  which  is 
given  an  importance  altogether  disproportionate  to  the 
moral,  and  which  yet  is  altogether  dependent  upon  the 
moral  for  significance — sustained  as  it  is,  and  attractive, 

80 


HAWTHORNE 

as  it  might  have  been,  had  it  been  taken  as  a  fairy  tale 
frankly  from  the  first. 

In  consequence,  too,  of  this  obsession  by  allegory,  the 
tales  in  which  he  leaves  it  alone  altogether  or  at  all 
events  does  not  lean  upon  it,  are  the  best,  I  think.  His 
excellent  faculty  is  released  for  freer  play  in  such  tales 
as  "The  Gentle  Boy,"  in  which  if  he  is  less  original,  he 
is  more  human,  and  takes  his  place  and  holds  his  own 
in  the  lists  of  literature — instead  of  standing  apart  in 
the  brown  twilight  and  indulging  his  fancy  in  framing 
insubstantial  fictions  for  the  illustration  of  moral  truths, 
not  always  of  much  moment.  But  the  tendency  grew 
upon  him  and  developed  into  a  fondness  for  almost  pure 
symbolism,  symbolism  in  which  paradoxically  the  alle 
gorizing  element  itself  becomes  attenuated  and  no  truths 
at  all  are  illustrated — the  result  being  simply  one  thing 
told  in  terms  of  another.  In  1858 — that  is,  at  the  age  of 
fifty-four — this  is  what  attracts  his  mature  powers  and 
ripened  mind,  as  recorded  in  the  "Italian  Note-Books": 
Apropos  of  a  newspaper  paragraph  respecting  a  ring 
worn  by  a  widower  and  containing  a  stone  into  which 
his  wife's  body  had  been  "chemically  resolved,"  he  says, 
"I  think  I  could  make  a  story  on  this  idea,"  and  pro 
ceeds  to  sketch  it.  "The  ring  should  be  one  of  the 
widower's  bridal  gifts  to  a  second  wife;  and,  of  course, 
it  should  have  wondrous  and  terrible  qualities,  sym 
bolizing  all  that  disturbs  the  quiet  of  a  second  marriage," 
and  so  on,  in  enumeration  of  this  disturbing  detail. 
The  "story"  could  hardly  have  been  remarkable,  but, 
assuming  that  it  had  to  be  built  on  the  "idea,"  it  would 

81 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

clearly  be  better  for  the  story,  once  built,  to  take  the 
"idea"  out  of  it  afterward.  A  great  deal  of  Haw 
thorne  would  be  the  better  for  the  extraction  of  the  alle 
gorical  and  symbolic  elements  combined  with  it  and 
constituting  in  its  author's  view  its  raison  d'etre.  Very 
certainly  it  would  be  if  upon  the  rest  he  had  seriously 
exercised  his  imagination,  instead  of  so  completely  sur 
rendering  to  his  fancy,  content  to  deprecate  complete 
irresponsibility  by  the  counterpoise  of  his  disillusioning 
good  sense — which  was  remarkable,  but  the  intrusion  of 
which  leaves  his  story  often  still  more  "in  the  air." 


" 


iv 

For  the  real  misfortune  of  Hawthorne  —  and  ours  — 
was  the  misconception  of  his  talent,  resulting  in  this 
cultivation  of  his  fancy  to  the  neglect  of  his  imagination. 
Issuing  from  the  curious  by-paths  of  literature  into  which 
this  led  him  —  a  seclusion  that  quite  matched  the  seclu 
sion  of  his  life  —  and  engaging  in  the  general  literary  com 
petition  on  the  immemorial  terms  for  the  exercise  of  the 
imagination,  it  is  not  to  be  doubted  that  he  would  have 
produced  works  far  otherwise  important  than  those 
which  in  the  main  he  wrote.  "The  Scarlet  Letter"  is 
there  to  prove  it.  His  imagination  was  a  puissant  one 
—  or  "beautiful  and  light,"  as  Mr.  James  says:  the  dis 
tinction  is  not  important  analytically,  since  in  the  case 
of  the  imagination  power  is  a  prerequisite  to  its  beautiful 
and  light  as  well  as  to  its  robust  exercise,  just  as  force 
is  essential  to  the  most  sensitive  precision  ;  it  is  the  effects 

82 


HAWTHORNE 

that  are  beautiful  and  light,  not  their  agent.  And  such 
effects — which  I  should,  rather,  incline  to  call  incon 
clusive  and  faint — Hawthorne  produced,  by  following 
the  line  of  least  resistance,  not  by  effort  and  concen 
tration.  Instead  of  giving  a  tale  more  substance  he 
wrote  another  equally  slight.  And  he  neglected  his 
imagination  because  he  shrank  from  reality.  Now, 
reality  is  precisely  the  province,  the  only  province,  the 
only  concern,  the  only  material  of  this  noblest  of  facul 
ties.  It  is,  of  course,  as  varied  as  the  universe  of  which 
it  is  composed.  There  is  the  reality  of  "Tom  Jones" 
and  the  reality  of  "Lear,"  for  example;  the  reality  of 
the  ideal,  indeed,  as  well  as  that  of  the  phenomenal — 
its  opposite  being  not  the  ideal  but  the  fanciful.  And 
Hawthorne  coquetted  and  sported  with  it  and  made 
mirage  of  it.  Instead  of  accepting  it  as  the  field 
of  his  imagination  he  made  it  the  playground  of  his 
fancy. 

Imagination  and  fancy  differ,  according  to  the  old 
metaphysic,  in  that,  both  transcending  experience,  one 
observes  and  the  other  transgresses  law.  Every  one  thus 
discriminates,  at  all  events,  between  the  imaginative 
and  the  fanciful.  No  writer  ever  had  a  deeper  sense,  or 
at  least  a  firmer  conviction,  of  the  august  immutability 
of  law — those  ordaining  principles  of  the  universe  un- 
begotten  by  the  race  of  mortal  men  and  forever  immune 
from  the  sleep  of  oblivion  itself — to  paraphrase  the 
classic  panegyric.  His  frequent  theme— the  soul  and 
the  conscience — absolutely  implies  the  recognition  of 
law  and  involves  its  acceptance.  And  philosophically 

83 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

his  conception  of  his  theme  fundamentally,  even  fatal 
istically,  insists  on  it.  Three  of  the  four  novels  embody 
its  predetermination.  But  too  often  in  his  treatment  of 
his  theme  its  basis  crumbles.  The  centre  of  gravity  too 
often  falls  outside  of  it — falls  outside  of  law  as  well  as 
of  experience — because  reality  impresses  and  appeals  to 
him  so  little,  because  his  necessity  for  dissolving  it  into 
the  insubstantial  is  so  imperative,  that  the  theme  itself 
is  frittered  away  in  the  course  of  its  exposition.  The 
law,  the  moral  truth,  which  is  the  point  of  departure,  or, 
as  I  say,  the  foundation  of  his  more  serious  work,  is  not 
only  not  enforced  but  positively  enervated.  At  every 
turn  the  characters  and  events  might,  one  feels,  evade 
its  constraint,  so  wholly  does  the  unreal  and  the  fantastic 
predominate  in  both  their  constitution  and  their  evolu 
tion.  Beings  so  insubstantial  and  transactions  so  fan 
tastic  (one  or  both  elements  are  generally  present)  can 
but  fitfully  and  feebly  illustrate  anything  so  solid  and 
stable  as  the  moral  principles  upon  which  the  real  uni 
verse  is  conducted. 

On  the  other  hand,  as  I  have  already  noted,  when 
his  theme  is  purely  fanciful  it  frequently  does  not  receive 
a  frankly  fantastic  treatment.  He  seems  to  shrink  from 
anything  so  inelastic  as  the  careful  preservation  of  its 
proper  character  and  is,  in  a  word,  so  enamored  of 
mirage  that  he  even  seems  bent  on  blurring  his  illusion, 
and  if  it  seems  to  be  acquiring  a  consistency  of  its  own 
introduces  some  element  of  reality  for  its  resolution. 
This  practice,  to  be  sure,  has  small  comparative  im 
portance,  save  as  illustrating  the  inveteracy  of  his  bias. 

84 


HAWTHORNE 

It  has  spoiled  far  less  literature  than  his  fanciful  per 
version  of  the  imagination,  which  has  had  serious  re 
sults.  I  do  not  suppose  anything  could  have  been 
made  of  "Septimius  Felton,  or  the  Elixir  of  Life"  in 
any  case,  except  under  the  happiest  circumstances  and 
with  the  nicest  art.  But  it  is  a  capital  instance  of  what 
Hawthorne's  fancy  can  do  with  a  theme  of  some  sug- 
gestiveness  in  the  way  of  emptying  it  of  all  signifi 
cance.  Contrast  his  performance  for  a  moment  with 
the  treatment  of  the  same  theme  by  unmixed  imagina 
tive  genius — Swift's  account  of  his  Struldbrugs.  The 
mere  material  of  this  vision  of  earthly  immortality, 
without  the  addition  of  any  further  detail,  felicitously 
moulded  into  the  form  of  a  romance,  would  make  one 
of  the  masterpieces  of  literature.  For  its  profound  and 
sombre  power  resides  in  its  appalling  reality.  This 
is  what  a  draught  of  the  Elixir  of  Life  would  pro 
duce  if  the  puerile  decoction  over  which  Septimius 
Felton  labors  through  so  many  wearisome  pages  had 
crowned  his  hopes — this,  and  not  the  insipid  experi 
ences  foreshadowed  in  the  vaporings  of  his  infatuated 
fancy. 

But  " Septimius  Felton"  is  a  posthumous  production 
and  one  of  Hawthorne's  failures.  Consider  a  work  of 
far  more  serious  ambition  if  not  in  all  respects  of  more 
representative  character— " The  Marble  Faun."  There 
is  the  same  kind  of  ineffectiveness  and  for  the  same 
reason,  the  frivolity  of  fancy.  The  theme  of  "The 
Marble  Faun,"  the  irretrievableness  of  evil  conjoined 
with  its  curious  transforming  power— the  theme  in  short 

85 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

of  that  profoundly  imaginative  masterpiece,  the  myth  of 
the  Fall  of  Man — is  rather  stated  than  exemplified  in  the 
story,  overlaid  as  this  is  with  its  reticulation  of  fantastic 
unreality.  Its  elaboration,  its  art,  tends  to  enfeeble  its 
conception ;  its  substance  extenuates  its  subject.  It  has 
had  an  extraordinary  vogue.  In  Rome  for  thousands  of 
Americans  "Hilda's  tower"  probably  still  divides  in 
terest  with  the  Sistine  Chapel  and  the  Vatican  Stanze. 
Dean  Stanley  said  he  had  read  it  seven  times  and  meant 
to  continue.  But  though  its  central  conception  is  one 
of  the  noblest  in  literature,  and  though  there  are  charm 
ing  and  truly  characteristic  touches  in  it — for  instance 
the  effect  on  innocence  of  the  mere  consciousness  of  evil 
as  shown  in  Hilda,  the  admirable  little  icicle  existing 
for  this  express  purpose — its  significance  is  entombed 
rather  than  exhibited  in  its  treatment.  Probably  its  ad 
mirers  considered  that  the  treatment  poetized  the  moral. 
That  is  clearly  the  author's  intention.  But  a  truth  is  not 
poetized  by  being  devitalized,  and  certainly  the  con 
sequences  of  sin  and  the  inexorableness  of  expiation  are 
inadequately  presented  in  a  tale  padded  out  of  all  pro 
portion  by  material  alien  in  its  nature,  however  "  artis 
tic"  in  its  atmosphere  and  constituting  half  its  volume, 
and  a  tale  moreover  obliged  to  make  its  moral  plain  in 
a  formal  statement,  and  to  rectify  its  inconclusiveness 
in  a  postscript.  The  lack  of  construction,  of  orderly 
evolution,  in  the  book  is  an  obvious  misfortune  and 
shows  very  clearly  Hawthorne's  artistic  weakness, 
whatever  his  poetic  force.  But  its  essential  defect  is 
its  lack  of  the  sense  of  reality,  to  secure  which  is  the 

86 


HAWTHORNE 

function  of  the  imagination,  and  through  which  alone 
the  truth  of  the  fundamental  conception  can  flower 
into  effective  exposition. 

Though  what  I  have  called  its  alien  constituent  is 
real  enough— ruins,  studios,  the  campagna,  the  carnival, 
etc.— the  material  of  "The  Marble  Faun"  is  perhaps 
too  miscellaneous  and  unrelated  for  Hawthorne's  im 
agination  to  unify  into  a  solid  support  of  his  moral 
theme,  even  if  it  had  not,  after  its  habitual  fashion,  re 
laxed  into  the  fantasticality  of  fancy  in  the  detail.  But 
certainly  his  imaginative  success  varies  directly  as  the 
density  of  his  material.  This  is  greatest  in  "The 
Scarlet  Letter,"  for  instance;  least  in  "Septimius  Fel- 
ton  "  among  the  longer  productions.  In  "  The  House  of 
the  Seven  Gables"  there  is  detail  enough,  but  of  singular 
thinness  and  an  almost  gaseous  expansion.  The  interest 
of  "The  Blithedale  Romance,"  the  most  artistically 
articulated  as  well  as  the  most  naturalistic  of  his  novels, 
resides  almost  altogether  in  the  part  suggested  directly 
by  Hawthorne's  Brook  Farm  experience.  "  Everything, 
you  know,"  he  says  or  makes  Sybil  Darcy  say,  "has  its 
spiritual  meaning,  which  is  to  the  literal  meaning  what 
the  soul  is  to  the  body."  This  unfortunate  doctrine  is 
the  only  thing  that  Hawthorne  ever  appears  to  have 
taken  literally.  But  even  this  doctrine,  taken  literally, 
recognizes  the  literal  meaning  and  the  body  as  media 
for  the  manifestation  of  the  spiritual  meaning  and  the 
soul.  Hawthorne's  distinction  assuredly  lay  in  his 
treatment  of  the  soul,  yet  since  he  was  in  no  danger  at 
all  from  materialistic  excess  or  emphasis  but  quite  the 

87 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

contrary,  his  treatment  of  the  soul  is  most  successful 
when  he  is  least  neglectful  of  the  body. 

It  is  indeed  generally  true  that  even  the  magical  and 
the  miraculous  gain  rather  than  lose  from  the  empha 
sized  reality  of  their  setting;  it  is  even  true  that  some  of 
the  most  noteworthy  works  of  the  imagination  contain 
ing  this  element  have  depended  for  their  abiding  interest 
on  this  setting  even  more  than  on  their  miracles  and 
magic.  It  requires  no  realistic  pedantry  to  perceive 
that  even  such  a  work  as  "The  Arabian  Nights"— to 
take  a  crucial  instance — exerts  its  permanent  charm 
largely  in  virtue  of  its  splendid  portrayal  of  an  entire  civ 
ilization,  whose  manners,  personages,  institutions,  and 
happenings  are  so  solidly  depicted  as  to  anchor  in  reality 
the  dreams  in  which  they  figure.  Quite  aside  from  the 
historical  value  of  the  "Nights'"  indirect  account  of  an 
extraordinary  society  in  decadence — though  it  is  not  to 
belittle  but  to  magnify  fiction  to  recognize  this  service  as 
within  its  province,  however  ponderous  such  a  view 
would  have  seemed  to  Hawthorne — quite  independently 
of  the  value  of  their  "criticism  of  life"  in  itself,  that  is  to 
say,  it  is  directly  because  of  this  very  element  that  their 
magic  element  is  given  a  body  and  substance  without 
which  its  appeal  to  the  imagination  would  be  slender 
and  insipid.  The  magic  is  a  convention — like  the  con 
ventions  of  the  stage.  Its  interest  is  in  its  assumed 
reality.  If  Scheherazade  had  constantly  called  Scha- 
riar's  attention  to  the  fact  of  its  assumption,  as  Haw 
thorne  does  with  his  readers,  we  may  be  sure  that  her 
career  would  have  been  brief.  On  the  contrary,  she 

88 


HAWTHORNE 

makes  the  unreal  seem  real  by  the  surrounding  pressure 
of  the  indubitably  real— just  as  the  stage  does.  In 
other  words  the  fanciful  element  of  fiction  must  be  given 
the  appearance  of  reality,  and  there  is  no  other  way  to  do 
this  than  by  providing  at  least  an  atmosphere  of  indis 
putable  reality.  The  borderland  between  the  two  is  an 
arid  marsh.  Either  reality  or  the  sense  of  it  is  necessary 
to  the  seriousness  of  any  composition — except,  appar 
ently,  allegory  of  the  Hawthorne  type.  This  is  why  the  i 
perennial  discussion  of  classicism,  romanticism,  realism, 
is  so  barren  and  has  come  to  seem  so  jejune.  The  names 
indicate  phases  of  taste  rather  than  principles  of  art. 
What  abides  as  the  necessary  element  of  all  genres  of 
fiction  is  reality,  or  the  sense  of  it,  conventionally  or 
otherwise  secured.  And  without  dealing  with  its  ele 
ments,  how  is  its  effect  to  be  obtained  ?  The  end  of  art, 
in  brief,  is  illusion,  but  the  illusion  of  reality.  Haw 
thorne  may  be  said  to  have  conceived  it  as  hallucination 
— in  which,  according  to  the  medical  definition,  "  there 
are  no  external  stimuli." 

Now,  however  his  divorce  from  reality  and  consecra 
tion  to  the  fanciful  may  have  succeeded  in  giving  him  a 
unique  position  and  demonstrating  his  originality — 
however  successful  he  may  have  been,  that  is  to  say, 
from  his  own  point  of  view — there  is  one  vital  respect,  at 
all  events,  in  which  he  almost  drops  out  of  the  novelist's 
category.  There  is  no  element  in  fiction  at  all  com 
parable  in  importance  with  its  portrayal  of  human  char 
acter  and  its  picture  of  human  life.  Fiction  is  the  genre-  ~7 
painting  of  literature  as  its  decorative  painting  is  poetry. 

89 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

J  But  Hawthorne  cared  nothing  for  people  in  life  and 
made  extraordinarily  little  of  them  in  his  books.  In  no 
other  fiction  are  the  characters  so  little  characterized  as 
in  his,  where  in  general  their  raison  d'etre  is  what  they 
illustrate,  not  what  they  are.  In  none  other  are  they  so 
airily  conceived,  so  slightly  sketched,  so  imperfectly 
defined.  Mr.  James  points  out,  I  think  justly,  that  with 
the  partial  exception  of  Donatello  in  "The  Marble 
Faun  "  there  are  no  types  among  them.  Elsewhere,  to 
be  sure,  he  complains  that  "Holgrave  is  not  sharply 
enough  characterized  "  and  "  is  not  an  individual  but  a 
type."  The  inconsistency  is  natural,  because  it  is 
natural  to  think  of  a  character  in  fiction  as  either  a  type 
orjan  individual,  and  when  you  are  considering  one  of 
[  wA  Hawthorne's  as  either,  you  think  he  must  be  the  other, 

uU*  ,  ,;\y  the  truth  being  that  he  is  neither.  He  has  not  enough 
features  for  an  individual  and  he  has  not  enough  repre- 
j^sentative  traits  for  a  type.  His  creator  evokes  him  in 
pseudo-Frankenstein  fashion  for  some  purpose,  sym 
bolical,  allegorical,  or  otherwise  illustrative,  and  has  no 
concern  for  his  character,  apart  from  this  function  of  it, 
either  for  its  typical  value  or  its  individual  interest.  He 
cares  nothing  for  his  personality;  the  more  real  he  made 
it  the  more  superfluous  it  would  seem  to  him,  since, 
though  it  is  a  prime  necessity  to  establish  it  first  of  all  if 
its  associated  actions  are  to  have  the  effect  of  reality,  the 
effect  of  reality  is  precisely  what  he  does  not  desire  to 
secure.  Consequently  his  dramas  have  the  air  of  being 
conducted  by  marionettes.  This  is  less  important  in  the 
short  stories,  of  course.  It  may  be  said  that  of  such  a 

90 


HAWTHORNE 

character  as  the  minister  in  "The  Black  Veil"  the 
reader  needs  to  be  told  nothing,  that  his  character  is 
easily  inferred  and,  anyhow,  is  not  the  point,  that  the 
point  is  his  wearing  the  veil  and  thereby  presenting  a 
rueful  picture  illustrative  of  our  uncleansed  condition 
from  secret  faults.  In  that  case  the  idea  is  enough,  and 
a  hortatory  paragraph  would  have  sufficed  for  it.  And 
in  any  case  it  is  easy  to  see  how  immensely  the  idea 
would  have  gained  in  effectiveness,  in  cogency,  if  the 
minister  had  been  characterized  into  reality — if  he  had 
been  characterized,  say,  by  the  author  of  the  "Ve*nus 
d'llle,"  a  story  that  makes  an  abiding  impression  on 
readers  whom  its  significance,  if  it  have  any,  wholly 
escapes.  But  in  sustained  fiction,  in  novels,  to  neglect 
the  personality  of  the  personages  is  to  invite  failure. 

Few  novelists  probably  realize  their  characters  suf 
ficiently  to  be  able  to  say,  with  Thackeray,  that  they 
"know  the  sound  of  their  voices."  But  most  of  them 
doubtless  would  like  to.  The  origin  of  most  characters, 
indeed,  in  fiction  of  any  moment  is  well  known  to  be 
such  as  Thackeray  himself  has  described  in  speaking  of 
"a  certain  Costigan  whom  I  had  invented  (as  I  suppose 
authors  invent  their  personages)  out  of  scraps,  heel 
taps,  odds  and  ends  of  character."  Hawthorne's,  it  is 
needless  to  say,  were  not  thus  conceived.  When  he 
needed  a  character  to  illustrate  one  of  his  deeply  medi 
tated  truths  or  one  of  his  fanciful  conceits,  he  invented 
it  ad  hoc.  His  characters,  indeed,  are  not  creations, 
but  expedients.  Roger  Chillingworth  is  an  expedient —  i 
and  as  such  the  only  flaw  in  "The  Scarlet  Letter,"  j 

91 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

whose  impressive  theme  absorbed  its  author  out  of  ab 
stractions,  as  I  have  heretofore  intimated,  and  com 
pelled  him,  except  in  the  case  of  Chillingworth,  to  create 
the  only  real  people  of  his  imaginary  world.  In  creating 
Dimmesdale  and  Hester — and  I  am  quite  sure  Pearl, 
also — Nature  herself,  as  Arnold  says  of  Wordsworth, 
"seems  to  take  the  pen  out  of  his  hand  and  write  for 
him."  Even  here,  one  is  bound  to  add,  the  portraits 
lack  the  loving  touch.  Hawthorne  seems  himself  to 
care  quite  as  much  for  Feathertop  as  for  Hester  Prynne. 
In  fact,  he  is  rather  partial  to  Feathertop — a  circum 
stance  which  a  reader  similarly  disposed  to  the  sym 
bolical  might  feel  justified  in  considering  significant. 
He  has  perhaps  a  weakness  for  such  characters  as 
Phoebe  in  "The  House  of  the  Seven  Gables"  and  Hilda 
in  "The  Marble  Faun."  But  no  one  would  pretend  to 
say  they  were  realized  with  any  definition.  They  are 
such  generalized  portraits  as  the  fancy  might  paint  of 
youth  and  innocence  in  a  sunbonnet  or  a  Leghorn  hat 
passing  its  window  in  a  quiet  street  of  Concord  or 
Salem.  Kenyon  is  certainly  sculpte  en  bois;  considering 
the  state  of  the  art  among  his  compatriots  then  in  Rome 
it  was  perhaps  a  happy  stroke  to  give  him  his  particular 
profession.  Hollingsworth  is  a  caricature — etched  with 
unaccountable  acidity  for  philanthropism,  than  which, 
at  least  in  its  less  odious  forms,  one  would  say  there  were 
worse  things.  Zenobia,  Miriam,  linger  in  one's  mem 
ory  rather  as  brunettes  than  as  women.  Coverdale  is 
quite  as  anemic  a  character  as  Priscilla  is  in  the  physique 
given  her  largely  for  mesmeric  reasons,  and  the  con- 

92 


HAWTHORNE 

eluding  announcement  that  he  is  in  love  with  her  is 
probably  an  idle  boast.  Hawthorne  particularly  en 
joyed  Trollope,  and  he  had  a  shrewd  observation  for 
casual  types  in  actual  life.  One  would  hardly  infer  it 
from  his  own  personages  and  is  inclined  to  find  in  the 
inconsistency  not,  or  not  only,  the  frequent  contrast 
between  actual  taste  and  artistic  practice,  but  additional 
evidence  of  his  curious  conception  of  and  respect  for  his 
peculiar  and  original  " genius." 

The  result  was  that  his  genius  took  him  out  of  the 
novelist's  field  altogether.  His  novels  are  not  novels. 
They  have  not  the  reality  of  novels.  And  they  elude  it 
not  only  in  their  personages  but  in  their  picture  of  life 
in  general.  "The  Scarlet  Letter"  itself  is  the  postlude 
of  a  passion.  Just  so  much  of  the  general  Salem  scene 
as  is  necessary  for  the  setting  of  the  extremely  concen 
trated  drama  is  presented  and  no  more.  Nowhere  else 
is  the  scene  treated  otherwise  than  atmospherically,  so 
to  speak.  It  does  not  constitute  a  medium  or  even  back 
ground,  but  penumbra.  The  social  picture  does  not 
exist.  The  quiet  Salem  streets  of  "The  House  of  the 
Seven  Gables,"  the  community  life  of  Blithedale,  the 
village  houses  and  hillocks  and  gossip  and  happenings 
of  "Septimius  Felton,"  though  the  War  of  Independence 
is  in  progress  and  Concord  fight  is  actually  an  incident, 
contribute  color,  not  substance,  to  the  story.  The 
Roman  ruins  and  churches,  and  studios  and  museums, 
the  campagna  landscape  and  the  Italian  towns  and 
country,  contribute  even  less  to  the  drama  of  "The 
Marble  Faun,"  being  distractions  and  digressions  in 

93 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

large  part,  and  so  not  only  not  an  integral  part  of  it  but 
even  applied  rather  than  integumental  embroidery  of  it. 
The  action  is  always  a  skeleton.  Its  direct  illustrative 
function  is  exclusively  considered.  It  receives  no  aid 
from  anything  incidental  or  indirect,  anything  super 
fluous  or  subsidiary,  which  in  a  certain  degree  is 
absolutely  necessary  if  the  theme  is  to  be  presented 
with  the  fulness  and  concreteness  of  a  picture.  It  is 
presented,  on  the  contrary,  with  the  lean  explicitness  of 
the  diagram.  One  "gets  the  idea" — a  sine  qua  non, 
to  be  sure,  of  a  serious  fiction  that  is  designed  like  Haw 
thorne's  to  enforce  some  particular  truth — but  the  sen 
suously  (and  logically)  inclined  must  ruefully  reflect 
that  if  this  is  all  that  is  to  be  had,  it  could  be  had  at 
even  less  expense;  a  statement  would  serve  as  well  as  a 
story.  It  is  like  a  building  in  which  the  supports  and 
buttresses  should  exactly,  instead  of  superabundantly, 
counterbalance  the  weights  and  thrusts.  The  insub 
stantial  effect  so  much  admired  in  Hawthorne  would 
be  secured,  but  it  would  hardly  be  satisfactory  to  the 
eye  or  the  mind,  which  are  adjusted  to  the  sense  of  sub 
stance  in  the  embodiment  of  even  the  ethereal. 

Not  that  the  novels  have  any  effect  of  succinctness 
corresponding  to  their  slenderness,  or  of  pith  matching 
their  lack  of  luxuriance.  On  the  contrary,  at  least  three 
of  them  are  distinctly  too  long.  But  this  is  simply,  to 
put  it  brutally,  because  they  are  spun  out.  "The 
Scarlet  Letter"  he,  perhaps  unfortunately,  conceived 
as  a  short  story  and,  beyond  doubt  unfortunately, 
pieced  out  with  an  incongruous  portal.  The  episod- 

94 


HAWTHORNE 

ical  form  of  "The  Blithedale  Romance"  injures  its 
evolution,  which,  however,  its  interest  would  hardly 
have  justified  prolonging.  But,  if  in  these  two  works 
he  did  not  very  well  know  how  to  continue,  in  "The 
House  of  the  Seven  Gables,"  "The  Marble  Faun,"  and 
"Septimius  Felton"  he  did  not  at  all  know  how  to  stop. 
The  first  is  swamped  in  detail  over  which  the  author 
lingers  as  if  mesmerized  by  his  own  daguerrotypist,  and 
unable  to  awake  from  his  dream  of  rendering  it  intangi 
ble  by  endless  retouching.  In  "The  Marble  Faun  "  not 
only  is  the  action  retarded  by  frequent  breaks,  but  the 
narrative  is  greatly  expanded  by  what,  as  I  have  said, 
is  not  remplissage  but  incrustation.  In  "Septimius 
Felton  "  bulk  is  achieved  by  the  primitive  expedient  of 
pure  redundancy.  Its  redundancy  passes  the  prolixity 
of  Cooper  in  his  most  complacent  moods,  and  is  the 
plain  witness,  the  unmistakable  symptom,  of  a  sterility 
in  the  subject  that  illusion  itself  could  only  hope  to  fer 
tilize  by  indefatigable  persistence. 

The  incompleteness  of  Hawthorne's  characters,  the 
inadequacy  of  his  social  picture,  the  lack  of  romantic 
richness  in  his  work,  have,  to  be  sure,  been  attributed 
largely  to  the  romantic  poverty  of  his  material — his 
environment.  The  leanness  of  this  social  world  has  been 
summed  up  from  the  romancer's  point  of  view  with  the 
explicitness  of  the  dilettante  dwelling  on  the  disagreeable: 

No  State  in  the  European  sense  of  the  word,  and  indeed  barely 
a  specific  national  name.  No  sovereign,  no  court,  no  personal 
loyalty,  no  aristocracy,  no  church,  no  clergy,  no  army,  no  diplo 
matic  service,  no  country  gentlemen,  no  palaces,  no  castles,  nor 
manors,  nor  old  country  houses,  nor  parsonages,  nor  thatched 

95 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

houses,  nor  ivied  ruins  ;  no  cathedrals,  nor  abbeys,  nor  little 
Norman  churches ;  no  great  universities  nor  public  schools — 
no  Oxford,  nor  Eton,  nor  Harrow ;  no  literature,  no  novels,  no 
museums,  no  pictures,  no  political  society,  no  sporting  class — 
no  Epsom  nor  Ascot. 

The  dirge  is  Mr.  James's— not  Ouida's.  It  is  in  a 
familiar  key.  Nothing  is  more  common  than  to  hear  it 
echoed  by  our  practitioners  in  all  the  arts.  Yet,  how 
ever  just  his  complaint  of  the  lack  of  an  atmosphere  to 
stimulate  his  initiative,  develop  his  talent,  and  train  his 
taste,  the  artist's  complaint  of  the  meagreness  of  his 
material  is,  speaking  strictly,  a  loose  one,  for  the  reason 
that  art  does  not  reside  in  material  but  in  treatment. 
All  that "  Alexandre  the  Great,"  as  Thackeray  calls  him, 
needed  was,  he  said,  "four  boards,  two  actors,  and  a 
passion."  Indeed,  richness  of  material  may  be  as 
much  of  a  handicap  as  a  help  to  the  artist.  If,  as  Taine 
says,  "  the  ugly  is  beautiful,  but  the  beautiful  is  still  more 
beautiful,"  the  artist  who  deals  with  it,  being  under 
bonds  to  make  it  serve  and  not  master  his  art,  must  pro 
portionally  make  his  art  still  more  effective.  His  failure 
to  do  so  is  the  cause  of  the  inanities  which  strew  the  path 
of  so-called  academic  art.  But  for  their  material,  these 
might,  it  is  true,  be  positive  instead  of  negative  failures, 
but  it  is  only  mediocrity  that  can  really  profit  by  the 
adventitious.  So  far  as  regards  his  material,  the  true 
artist's  concern  is  not  with  his  star  but  with  himself. 
Rembrandt  would  have  found  no  advantage  in  Veronese's 
material,  and  Veronese  himself  would  interest  us  more 
deeply  if,  like  Titian  and  Tintoretto,  he  had  possessed 
the  personal  force  to  answer  to  the  artistic  demand  that 

96 


HAWTHORNE 

the  sumptuousness  and  splendor  of  his  material  made 
more  rather  than  less  exigent.  On  the  other  hand,  one 
may  well  doubt  if  Ibsen,  for  example,  would  ever  have 
suggested  Shakespeare,  even  to  the  order  of  ap 
preciation  to  which  he  does  suggest  Shakespeare,  if 
he  had  had  to  deal  with  a  world  remotely  approaching 
Shakespeare's  in  richness  of  material.  But  as  to  Haw 
thorne  there  is  no  possible  question.  His  environment 
furnished  him  material  exactly,  exquisitely,  suited  to  A  /u/J 
his  genius.  His  subject  was  the  s^nl,  and  for  the  ' 
enactment  of  the  dramas  of  the  soul  Salem  was  as 
apt  a  stage  as  Thebes.  The  New  England  of  Haw 
thorne's  time  certainly  cannot  be  considered  as  a  pos 
sible  theatre  for  the  comedie  humaine,  but  Hawthorne 
has  himself  demonstrated  that  the  New  England  of  an 
even  blanker  and  bleaker  period  was  a  fit  theatre  for 
the  human  tragedy.  "The  Scarlet  Letter"  is  so  exclu 
sively  a  drama  of  the  soul  as  to  be  measurably  inde 
pendent  of  an  elaborate  setting  in  a  social  picture.  But 
if  Hawthorne^s  other  works  were  as  well  placed,  as 
firmly  established,  as  deeply  rooted  in  their  environment, 
they  would  be  works  of  very  different  value.  That  they 
are  not  is  not  the  fault  of  their  milieu,  but  of  their 


Something  seems  distinctly  left  out  of  his  organization 
—  that  particular  faculty  whose  function  it  is  to  make  the 
most  of  its  fellows.  In  default  of  it  he  took  apparently 
the  same  serenely  fatalistic  view  of  himself,  of  his  own 

97 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 


genius,  that  he  did  of  life  in  his  books.  This  is  a  familiar 
phenomenon  in  the  sphere  of  character  and  morals.  We 
are  all  acquainted  with  the  morally  fatalistic  character. 
It  is  almost  invariably  of  a  high  type;  otherwise  it  could 
not  get  along  at  all,  since  its  peculiarity  is  that  it  dis 
penses  with  effort.  This  nature,  with  its  acceptance 
of  its  own  constitution  as  unalterable,  experiencing 
satisfaction  without  elation,  and  meeting  discourage 
ment  without  thought  of  amendment,  self-centred 
and  independent,  without  alien  support  or  altruistic 
endeavor,  never  dreaming  of  regeneration  or  submis 
sive  to  discipline,  conceiving  its  constitution  as  a  given 
and  constant  quantity  that  may  mould  its  environ 
ment  so  far  as  it  must  meet  it,  but  never  be  subdued  to 
what  it  works  in,  and,  above  all,  sceptical  of  climbing 
on  stepping-stones  of  its  dead  self  to  higher  things — this 
morally  fatalistic  temperament,  which,  as  I  say,  is  not 
unfamiliar,  Hawthorne  undoubtedly  possessed.  But 
what  is  more  remarkable  is  that  he  possessed  the  mental 
organization  to  match  it.  Back  of  both  lay  the  feel 
ing  of  reasonable  self-satisfaction — the  self-satisfaction 
which  the  instinct  of  self-preservation  makes  an  indis 
pensable  postulate  of  fatalism.  Though  they  have  de 
pressed  moods,  as  Hawthorne  certainly  did,  few  Cal- 
vinists  doubt  their  own  election.  It  is  almost  amusing 
to  note  the  old  Pagan  pride,  having  in  due  course  of 
evolution  passed  through  the  phase  of  the  Christian 
humilitas—the  great  mediaeval  virtue— partially  revert 
ing  to  type  in  the  self-satisfaction  of  the  Puritans,  of 
whom  Hawthorne  was  a  very  genuine  son. 

98 


HAWTHORNE 

Hence,  no  doubt,  in  considerable  measure,  his  bland 
acceptance  of  his  genius  as  something  fixed  rather  than 
potential,  and  his  diversion  into  its  particular  channels  of 
the  material  he  might  otherwise,  by  energy  and  effort, 
by  study  and  application,  have  dealt  with  on  a  larger 
scale,  to  profounder  purpose  and  with  more  substantial 
results.  "The  Scarlet  Letter"  is  an  eloquent  and  con 
vincing  witness  against  his  comfortable  and  unfortunate 
illusion.  Yet  he  seems  to  see  only  its  leaden  casket,  and 
calls  its  negligible  successor  "  more  characteristic  of  my 
mind  and  more  proper  and  natural  for  me  to  write." 
"In  the  name  of  the  Muses,  then,"  one  feels  like  ex 
claiming,  "bring  some  pressure  to  bear  on  this  sacro 
sanct  mind,  and,  with  less  regard  for  what  is  proper 
and  natural  to  its  preferences,  demonstrate  by  another 
masterpiece,  and  still  another,  that  its  constitution  is 
not  so  immutable  as  you  conceive  it." 

Descend  into  the  arena,  however,  and  contend  for 
the  world's  prizes  in  the  recognized  lists  of  literature, 
Hawthorne  could  not.  Of  the  mental  constitution  and 
capacities  which  heredity  disposed  him  to  look  upon 
as  final,  environment,  too,  restricted  the  development. 
He  was,  to  be  sure,  quite  out  of  sympathy  with  his  time 
and  its  tendencies.  But  New  England  transcendental 
ism  was  too  universal  a  movement  for  any  one  wholly  to 
escape  its  influences.  Hawthorne's  aloofness  did  not 
secure  his  immunity.  It  was  indeed  a  gospel  expressly 
designed  for  the  isolated.  Thoreau  at  Walden  was  its 
archetype.  And,  though  Hawthorne's  solitude  was  less 
express  and  voluntary  and  certainly  not  of  an  explicit 

99 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

transcendental  sanction,  but  rather  due  to  temperament 
and  mood,  it  nevertheless  fostered  his  preoccupation 
with  the  soul  rather  than  with  the  mind  or  the  senses. 
He  could  think  out  his  allegories  and  polish  up  their 
articulation  with  the  actual  more  unremittingly  by  him 
self  than  by  talking  them  over  with  Alcott.  But  tran 
scendentalism  was  in  the  very  air  he  breathed,  and 
though  he  had  little  joy  in  the  company  of  its  votaries, 
he  hardly  changed  his  moral  atmosphere  in  seques 
trating  himself  from  their  society. 

Transcendentalism  was  the  sublimation  of  the  gospel 
of  individuality,  and  may  be  summed  up  in  Carlyle's 
pronouncement  that  the  light  of  one's  own  mind  is  "the 
direct  inspiration  of  the  Almighty."  Hawthorne  could 
not  only  perceive  but  satirize  the  eccentricities  derived 
from  a  literal  subscription  to  this  doctrine.  But  the 
contemplation  of  these  increased  his  self-concentration, 
and  the  doctrine  itself  was  as  much  his  own  as  it  was  that 
of  the  most  fantastic  speculators  around  him.  Ajid  as 
a  corollary  of  this  universal  belief  in  individual  inspira 
tion  the  belief  in  the  prevalence  of  genius  was  general. 
There  has  never,  probably,  before  or  since,  been  so 
much  "genius"  abroad.  The  word  talent  does  not 
exist  in  the  transcendental  vocabulary.  The  profession 
of  literature  presupposed  genius.  Every  one  who  wrote 
had  it.  Channing,  Everett,  even  Alcott  had  it.  Haw 
thorne  was  singularly  modest.  His  belief  in  his  genius, 
its  peculiar  character,  and  the  propriety  of  considering 
this  in  his  writings  was  not  in  the  least  vainglorious. 
His  serene  satisfaction  with  what  he  conceived  to  be  its 

100 


HAWTHORNE 

limitations,  as  inevitable,  as  immitigable,  led  him  in  fact 
to  exaggerate  them.     Thus  both  his  ancestral  fatalism 

f-~id  his  transcendental  environment  obscured  for  him  . 
ie  fact  that  he  had  an  extraordinary  amount  of  talent 
hich  it  behooved  him  to  cultivate,  and  magnified  his 
consciousness  of  having  a  particular  kind  of  talent  which 
it  amused  him  to  exercise.  And  thus  he  made  what  seems 
to  me,  as  I  have  said,  the  cardinal  error  of  his  career — 
an  error  of  tragic  import  to  American  literature — by 
indulging  his  fancy  in  lieu  of  developing  his  imagination. 
For  the  development  of  his  imagination,  too,  his 
own  temperament  was  too  little  enthusiastic.  He  was 
eminently  a  man  of  sound  sense — distinctly  the  most 
hard-headed  of  our  men  of  genius.  Beyond  thinking"} 
the  vague  and  the  mysterious  nearer  the  soul  and  real 
truth  than  the  definite  and  the  explicit,  and  consequently 
the  proper  content  of  literature,  he  did  not  go.  He 
never  systematized  in  the  least  nor  even  speculated. 
There  is  no  mysticism  in  his  philosophy.  He  had  not 
in  fact  any  particular  spiritual  adventurousness.  His 
entire  body  of  doctrine  is  traditional.  What  interested 
him  in  the  speculative  sphere  is  to  be  found  in  the  theology 
in  which  he  had  been  brought  up — the  irreparableness 
of  sin,  the  necessity  of  expiation,  the  allegory  of  the  Fall, 
and  its  fast  anchorage  in  human  nature,  the  suffering 
of  the  innocent  through  the  guilty.  The  emancipation 
of  transcendentalism  was  as  much  moonshine  to  him  as 
was  the  materialization  of  dogma  and  doctrine.  His 
clear-seeing  mind  robbed  revelation  of  its  sanctions, 
without  in  the  least  reconstructing  its  fundamental  data. 

101 


AMERICAN    I'llOSK    MASTKKS 

He  was  not  only  hard-headed,  he  was  distinctly  unsenti 
mental,  if  the  epithet  may  be  applied  l.o  a  nature  just, 
kind,  and  devoted  in  (In-  family  relations  and  domestic 
lift-.  He  was  particularly  insensitive  In  exterior  personal 
influences.  All  the  enthusiasm  for  reform  with  which 
the  middle  decades  of  his  cenlnry  echoed  left  him  cold. 
He  was  unmoved  by  their  numerous  agitations,  from 
questions  of  did  to  those  of  philosophy,  from  reform  of 
attire  to  negro  emancipation.  Philanthropy  in  general 
he  thoroughly  disbelieved  in.  He  ridicules  it  through 
put  the  whole  course  of  one  of  his  few  novels,  and  tries 
hard  to  prove  then-  is  something  sinister  in  it,  his 
imagination  having  discovered  a  veritable  mare's  nest, 
apparently,  in  pondering  in  his  seclusion  the  adage  that 
"Charity  begins  at  home."  He  says  expressly,  and  to 
considerably  more  purpose,  in  a  letter  to  his  sister-in- 
law,  "The  good  of  others,  like  our  own  happiness,  is  not 
to  be  attained  by  direct  ell'ort,  but  incidentally";  which 
statement  is  nevertheless  singularly  free  from  the  ardor 
of  illusion.  Hut  the  ardor  of  illusion  is  exactly  what  he 
never  had.  This  is  why  a  dis.-eniing  I'Yeneh  critic, 
Kmile  Montegut,  describes  him  as  a  "roniancicr  pessi- 
iniste"  a  pessimist  being  precisely  a  nature  without 
illusions.  He  had  even  less  ardor  than  lie  had  illusion. 
During  what  is  usually,  even  for  the  unusually  self- 
possessed,  a  period  of  fervor  lie  writes  to  his  aflianced: 
"Our  souls  are  in  happiest  unison,  hut  we  must  not  dis 
quiet  ourselves  if  every  tone  be  not  re-echoed  from  one 
to  the  other — if  every  shade  be  not  reflected  in  the  al 
ternate  mirror.  Our  broad  and  general  sympathy  is 

102 


HAWTHORNE 

enough  to  secure  our  bliss,  without  our  following  it  into 
minute  details." 

His  nature  clearly  was  self-sustaining.  He  never 
felt  the  need  of  the  support  that  in  the  realm  of  the  affec 
tions  is  the  reward  of  self-surrender,  lie  had  no  doubt 
an  ideal  family  life — that  is  to  say,  ideal  in  a  particular 
way,  for  he  had  it  on  rather  particular  terms,  one  sus 
pects.  These  were,  in  brief,  his  own  terms.  He  was 
worshipped,  idoli/ed,  canonized,  and  on  his  side  it 
probably  re<|iiired  small  effort  worthily  to  fill  the  r6le  a 
more  ardent  na.liire  would  have  either  merited  less  or 
found  more  irksome.  Me  responded  at  any  rate  with 
absolute,  devotion.  1 1  is  domestic  periphery  bounded 
his  vital  interests.  Me  had  a  few  early  friends,  such  as 
youth  that  is  not  abnormal  or  eccentric,  and  Hawthorne 
certainly  was  neither,  cannot  fa.il  to  make,  and  these  he 
kept  throughout  life  with  admirable  loyalty,  but  without 
adding  to  their  number.  Loyalty  itself  is  of  quite  a 
different  fibre  from  warm-heartedness.  It  has  often 
less  than  nothing  t.o  do  with  susceptibility  to  the  attrac 
tiveness  of  others.  Hawthorne's  loyalty  to  Pierce  was 
more  than  honorable  to  him,  it  was  in  every  way  ad 
mirable,  the  trail  of  a  man  instinctively  convinced  that 
there  is  nothing  in  the  changes  of  circumstance,  or  even 
of  character  this  side  of  grave  deterioration,  to  make  a 
change  of  real  feeling  in  a  friendship  more  important 
than  its  conservation.  With  Hawthorne  opinion  had 
certainly  no  more  than  its  just  weight,  and  differences 
in  it  were  of  small  account  compared  with  fundamental 
agreement  of  feeling.  Of  course,  too,  he  never  differed 

103 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

greatly  with  Pierce  in  opinion.  He  was,  after  all,  a 
Democrat,  though  he  was  for  his  day  extraordinarily 
non-partisan.  Non-partisanship,  however,  inter  arma, 
is  itself  a  proof  of  a  cool  temperament  when  it  is  not 
itself  of  an  ardent  nature,  as  Hawthorne's  was  not.  He 
was  thoroughly  patriotic  in  his  sympathies,  rejoiced  at 
Northern  victory  and  despaired  at  Northern  defeat; 
but  he  stood  rather  aloof  from  the  struggle,  not  so  much 
because  he  saw  both  sides  so  sympathetically  as  because 
Schw'drmerei  in  any  degree  was  foreign  to  him. 

He  met  and  conversed  with  Lincoln,  but  quite  missed 
his  personality,  which  was  curious  considering  his  eye 
for  character.  For  character  he  had  the  observer's,  not 
the  divining  eye.  He  was  eminently  an  observer — 
lynx-like  on  occasion.  He  made  little  or  no  use  of  his 
faculty  of  observation  in  his  novels.  But  his  note 
books  testify  to  an  almost  microscopic  exercise  of  it. 
He  notes  everything;  far  beyond  the  confines  of  the  sig 
nificant  he  is  still  scrutinizing.  And  the  "Tales"  and 
"Mosses"  here  and  there  witness  a  searching  notation  of 
the  "types"  of  his  environment,  from  the  old  apple-man 
to  the  parson,  from  the  custom-house  lounger  to  the 
sequestered  spinster,  their  various  characteristic  traits, 
and  the  various  suggestions  of  these  as  they  appealed  to 
his  indefatigable  but  otiose  fancy.  Yet  his  study  of 
traits  never  led  him  to  create  a  character,  nor  his  reflec 
tion  on  character  to  illustrate  a  moral  truth  with  one — 
save  in  the  exotic  instance  of  Donatello,  whose  abun 
dantly  described  faun-like  nature  is  "transformed"  into 
rather  characterless  character.  His  manifest  preferences 

104 


HAWTHORNE 

for  Phoebe,  Priscilla,  Hilda,  Pearl,  among  his  per 
sonages  accord  with  his  predilection  for  the  unde 
veloped.  He  observed  too  coolly.  He  lacked  the  ardor 
in  which  the  data  he  accumulated  should  fuse  into  some 
general  imaginative  conception  of  real  significance  and 
substantial  proportions.  His  humor  lacks  mirth.  He 
has  less  sentiment  than  Irving — far  less.  His  stories  do 
not  touch  him.  An  occasional  note  like  that  of 
of  "The  Gentle  Boy"  sounds  rather  plaintive  than 
pathetic,  and  hardly  moves  us  as  the  franker  feeling 
of  Irving's  "Rural  Funerals,"  for  example.  He  is 
not  moved  himself.  He  preserves  his  equilibrium  a 
little  too  admirably.  The  subject  does  not  call  for 
reserve;  it  is  too  slight.  Considered  as  a  creative 
artist  he  writes  too  much  like  a  critic.  His  detach 
ment  is  too  great. 

With  such  a  character — so  eminent  for  good  sense, 
so  unsentimental — his  much-talked-of  shyness  needs 
qualification.  One  of  those  friends  from  whom 
nothing  saves  the  shyest,  Dr.  Loring,  his  fellow  towns 
man,  says:  "The  working  of  his  mind  was  so  sacred 
and  mysterious  to  him  that  he  was  impatient  of  any 
attempt  at  familiarity  or  even  intimacy  with  the  divine 
power  within  him.  .  .  .  The  sacredness  of  his  genius 
was  to  him  like  the  sacredness  of  his  love."  But  this 
may  easily  be  the  transcendental  way  of  recording  an 
occasion  on  which  when  engaged  in  composition  he  was 
unwilling  to  be  disturbed,  even  by  Loring.  He  was  less 
shy,  perhaps,  than  taciturn — his  own  epithet.  "Haw 
thorne  was  among  the  most  enterprising  of  the  merry- 

105 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

makers,"  says  Fields  of  a  picnic  occasion.  In  England 
he  turned  out  a  ready  and  apt  after-dinner  orator — an 
impossibility  for  a  thoroughly  shy  man.  He  apologizes 
in  "The  Scarlet  Letter"  prologue  for  his  tendency  to 
talk  about  himself  to  his  readers  and,  as  I  have  said, 
this  tendency  was  marked.  He  writes  to  Longfellow, 
a  dozen  years  after  leaving  college:  "By  some  witch 
craft  or  other — for  I  cannot  really  assign  any  reason 
able  why  or  wherefore — I  have  been  carried  apart 
from  the  main  current  of  life.  ...  I  have  secluded 
myself  from  society;  and  yet  I  never  meant  any 
such  thing."  That  is  Hawthorne's  weakness.  In 
a  sense  he  never  meant  anything.  He  drifted.  In 
his  own  words:  "An  influence  beyond  our  control  lays 
its  strong  hand  on  everything  we  do  and  weaves  its  con 
sequences  into  an  iron  tissue  of  necessity."  He  was,  in 
fact,  a  fatalist.  No  wonder  that  his  ideality  was  fanci 
ful  and  insubstantial,  and  that  its  glimpses  of  real  and 
vital  truth  are  less  frequent  than  they  are  sombre  and 
profound 

VI 

Thus  predisposed  by  heredity,  by  environment,  and 
by  constitution  to  work  what  he  conceived  to  be  his  own 
peculiar  vein,  and  what  every  one  around  him  agreed 
was  his  rare  and  original  genius,  Hawthorne,  for  the 
most  part,  as  I  say,  supinely  suffered  his  real  gift  to  lie 
fallow.  What  it  needed  was  development,  and  for 
development  it  needed  not  only  exercise  but  nurture. 
With  its  moral  austerity  it  would  have  responded  beauti- 

106 


HAWTHORNE 

fully  to  the  influences  of  culture.  And  from  such  in 
fluences  he  protected  himself  with  signal  perversity  and 
success.  His  imagination  was  not  nurtured  because  his 
mind  was  not  enriched.  His  mind,  in  fact,  contained 
much  less  furniture  than  that  usually  possessed  by 
writers  who  are  ever  called  great.  He  had  no  particular 
amount  of  reading— beyond  that  current  at  the  time 
among  all  so-called  educated  people:  Dr.  Johnson,  Scott, 
Byron,  Tom  Moore,  the  belles-lettres  of  the  period  then 
closing.  Instead  of  reading  he  reflected — "brooded," 
perhaps,  in  his  pythian  character.  But  he  had  very  little 
to  brood  over.  Hence  the  insubstantial  nature  of  his 
fanciful  progeny.  Hence  his  fondness  for  mirage.  Fa 
miliarity  with  the  best  that  has  been  thought  and  said 
— and  done — in  the  world  would  have  diverted  him  from 
his  irresponsibility  and  not  only  stimulated  his  imagina 
tion  by  enlarging  its  horizon  but  provided  it  with  ma 
terial — dispensed  him  from  the  necessity,  however  dis 
sembled  as  his  true  and  native  function,  of  spinning  his 
web  of  fantasticality  from  his  own  substance.  Not  only 
was  his  imagination  of  just  the  quality  to  react  admirably 
under  such  stimulus  and  deal  admirably  with  extended 
material,  but  his  temperament  was  of  just  the  order  to 
be  developed  instead  of  paralyzed  by  external  agencies. 
What  drove  it  in  upon  itself  was  not  sensitiveness  but 
non-receptivity.  He  had  the  good  sense,  the  lack  of 
enthusiasm,  the  disillusioned  pessimism  of  the  man  of 
the  world.  Only,  his  world  was  Salem  and  Concord 
when  it  was  not,  indeed,  the  still  narrower  confines  of 
the  custom-house  and  the  old  manse. 

107 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

The  real  world  was  to  him  terra  incognita,  or  at  least 
negligible.  Europe,  especially,  was  but  a  museum  to 
him.  Nothing  could  show  more  levity  than  the  de 
tached  and  essentially  supercilious  attitude-  betrayed 
in  his  account  of  it.  England,  France,  Italy  all  rubbed 
him  the  wrong  way.  Yet  he  never  had  any  suspicion 
that  the  fact  might  be  his  fault.  His  candor  is  delight 
ful;  his  conviction  that  candor  is  the  one  virtue  of 
criticism,  that  it  "lets  him  out,"  so  to  speak,  still  more 
so;  his  loyalty  to  his  crudest  conclusions,  most  of  all. 
English  readers  find  him  ungallant  in  recording  his  view 
of  the  British  matron  as  compound  of  steaks  and  sir 
loins.  His  answer  is  that  he  loves  Englishmen  as  much 
as  his  own  countrymen,  but  that  the  passage  must  stand 
because  the  view  is  correct.  He  was  beautifully  honest 
— always.  No  doubt  he  would  have  been  if  he  had  ap 
preciated  how  it  made  him  appear,  if  he  had  realized 
that  one  opinion  is  not  as  good  as  another;  but  as  a 
sensitive  plant  he  is  surely  a  superstition.  He  travelled 
all  over  England,  and  chronicled  his  journeys  and  reflec 
tions  with  the  assiduous  minuteness — and  somewhat  the 
interest — of  Irving's  account  of  Columbus's  voyages. 
But  he  never  became  familiar  with  English  life  and 
rarely  met  any  representative  Englishmen.  Those  of 
his  own  profession  he  avoided  with  marked  success.  He 
never  met  Thackeray,  or  Dickens,  or  Bulwer,  or  Disraeli. 
George  Eliot  he  would  not  go  to  see  because  there  was 
another  Mrs.  Lewes.  He  seems  to  have  had  no  curi 
osity — which,  of  course,  is  the  primum  mobile  of  culture. 
His  substitute  for  it  is  the  most  singular  interest  in  the 

108 


HAWTHORNE 

world — peculiar  probably  to  American  psychology — 
namely,  that  of  travelling  around  the  great  world  and 
applying  one's  own  yard-stick  to  the  phenomena  it  pre 
sents  to  one's  virgin  view.  The  English  are  more  un 
moved,  more  listless  in  their  contemplation  of  what  the 
world  has  to  offer.  I  remember  in  Athens,  once,  a  party 
of  Nonconformists  returning  from  Palestine  and  delayed 
a  few  hours  by  the  necessity  of  changing  steamers  at  the 
Piraeus.  They  were  sitting  around  the  palace  square. 
I  asked  their  " personal  conductor"  why  he  didn't  take 
them  up  to  the  Acropolis.  "I  tried  to,"  he  replied, 
"but  they  said  they  had  'seen  ruins  enough."3  Anal 
ogous  Americans  would  have  gone  up,  but  would  not 
have  been  unduly  impressed. 

Art  occupied  a  good  deal  of  Hawthorne's  thoughts 
while  he  was  in  Italy,  but  it  certainly  did  not  unduly  im 
press  him.  He  never  found  out  what  it  was.  The  fact 
is  not  so  remarkable  as  it  may  seem  at  the  present  time. 
In  his  day  most  Americans,  educated  or  not,  were  in  his 
case.  That  art  had  a  particular  province,  language,  and 
sanction  of  its  own  was  not  widely  understood.  But 
then  it  was,  in  general,  almost  wholly  neglected.  There 
was,  however,  a  colony  of  American  artists  in  Rome  and 
Hawthorne  saw  a  good  deal  of  these,  and  naturally  came 
to  consider  the  subject  a  good  deal  and  with  his  usual 
candor.  The  amount  of  attention  he  paid  it,  yes  and 
the  exceptional  ill  luck  he  had  with  it,  make  him  excep 
tional  among  his  contemporary  countrymen — who,  be 
sides,  were  not  great  writers.  Moreover,  he  made  it  a 
distinct  feature  of  "The  Marble  Faun."  He  seems 

109 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

to  have  thought  it  was  chiefly  sculpture,  partly  perhaps 
because  Story  was  a  sculptor,  and  Hawthorne  was  very 
loyal  to  his  friends;  having  in  the  case  of  Pierce  got 
around  the  question  of  slavery,  he  would  naturally  not 
let  a  bagatelle  like  art  handicap  his  good-will.  He  was 
undoubtedly  perfectly  sincere  in  either  instance,  and  the 
latter  at  all  events  shows  how  lightly,  morals  aside,  he 
took  the  world  which  he  had  so  long  made  the  sport  of 
his  fancy.  He  cannot  say  enough  about  Story's  "  Cleo 
patra."  She  is  "a  terrible,  dangerous  woman,  quiet 
enough  for  the  moment,  but  very  likely  to  spring  upon 
you  like  a  tigress."  Her  Coptic  cast  of  countenance  also 
illustrates  Story's  historical  accuracy — in  modelling  a 
Greek.  It  is  impossible  to  defend  him  from  the  late 
R.  H.  Hutton's  charge  of  sprinkling  "The  Marble 
Faun"  with  "puffs  of  American  sculpture,"  which 
shows,  too,  how  lightly  he  took  literature  also,  or,  at 
least,  his  own  contributions  to  it.  For  painting  he  did 
not  greatly  care.  He  admitted  Claude,  but  he  preferred 
Brown — preferred  Brown  indeed  to  any  one,  except 
possibly  Thompson.  Furthermore,  he  seems  to  have 
looked  upon  sculpture  as  essentially  marble,  whose 
"purity"  and  transparency  afforded  him  positive  sen 
sations  of  pleasure.  Bronze  left  him  cold  and  he  would 
not  have  subscribed  to  its  current  aggrandizement. 
Perhaps  he  unconsciously  transferred  to  marble  some  of 
the  pleasure  he  took  in  the  moral  spotlessness  of  such 
characters  as  Hilda  and  Phoebe. 

His  interest  in  all  art  was  indeed  a  specifically  moral, 
not  an  aesthetic  one.     He  takes  the  "literary  view"  with 

110 


HAWTHORNE 

a  vengeance.  He  terms  the  so-called  "Beatrice  Cenci" 
the  greatest  picture  in  the  world,  apparently  forgetting 
that  he  has  not  seen  all  its  rivals  for  such  pre-eminence, 
and  finds  its  neighbor,  the  so-called  "Fornarina,"  re 
pulsive — because  the  one  portrait  makes  him  think  of  a 
pitiful  tragedy  and  the  other  recalls  the  fact  that  the 
painter  to  whom  it  was  then  ascribed  had  a  mistress. 
The  so-called  question  of  "the  nude  in  art" — which,  so 
far  as  it  is  a  question,  certainly  belongs  rather  to  the 
police  than  to  general  criticism — troubled  him  a  good 
deal.  Mr.  James  finds  his  objection  to  the  nude  indica 
tive  of  his  lack  of  the  plastic  sense,  which  is  surely  to 
consider  it  as  a  superfluity.  However,  another  biog 
rapher,  Mr.  Moncure  Conway,  says  he  was  converted 
from  a  position  savoring  of  intolerance  so  far  as  to 
declare  his  first  views  only  through  one  of  his  characters 
— rather  fatuously,  I  should  say,  selecting  Miriam  for 
the  purpose — and  that  the  honor  of  this  partial  conver 
sion  is  due  to  Mrs.  Jameson,  whom  doubtless  he  felt  he 
could  trust.  The  choice  he  offers  among  the  many 
evidences  of  his  aesthetic  innocence  is  bewildering,  but 
without  being  quite  sure  I  am  inclined  to  fix  on  the  gift 
with  which  he  endows  Hilda  as  the  one  that  demon 
strates  it  most  absolutely.  Hilda's  peculiar  talent,  it 
will  be  remembered,  consisted  in  a  faculty  of  copying 
the  masterpieces  of  art  with  such  penetration  as  to 
bring  out  beauties  in  them  unsuspected  by  the  masters 
themselves.  It  is  needless  to  add  that  this  power  was 
accompanied  by  a  complete  inaptitude  for  original  work. 
Hawthorne's  fancy  is  here  at  its  most  characteristic. 

Ill 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

Providing  Hilda  with  an  exclusively  sympathetic  nature, 
he  deduces  from  it  a  faculty  incapable  of  self-expression, 
but  able  to  divine  what  the  greatest  artists  were  groping 
for  in  their  approximate  productions.  This  puerile 
degradation  of  art  in  the  interest  of  irresponsible  fancy 
is,  at  all  events,  both  a  striking  illustration  of  what  Haw 
thorne  perversely  preferred  to  the  exercise  of  a  noble 
imagination,  and  a  striking  witness  of  the  insufficiency 
of  his  culture  to  save  his  intellectual  levity  from  reduc 
tion  to  the  absurd. 

With  another  great  factor  of  civilization  and  conse 
quently  a  quintessential  of  culture,  history,  namely,  his 
acquaintance  was  even  slighter  than  his  familiarity  with 
plastic  art.  The  Parthenon's  reputation  might  have 
drawn  him  to  the  Athenian  Acropolis,  but  that  of 
Pericles  would  hardly  have  stirred  him  from  the  palace 
square.  Prattling  pleasantly  of  the  Concord  battle 
ground,  he  says  with  that  candor  which  so  frequently 
fringes  fatuity,  quite  in  the  conventional  manner  of 
pride  aping  humility:  "For  my  own  part,  I  have  never 
found  my  imagination  much  excited  by  this  or  any  other 
scene  of  historic  celebrity."  "Septimius  Felton"  is  a 
tale  of  the  Revolution,  but  its  references  to  it  are  casual 
and  reluctant.  "Our  story,"  says  Hawthorne,  "is  an 
internal  one,  dealing  as  little  as  possible  with  outward 
events,  and  taking  hold  of  these  only  where  it  cannot  be 
helped."  In  Rome  itself  he  is  quite  imperturbable  and 
detached.  The  perpetual  pageant  passing  before  the 
cultivated  imagination  hardly  wins  a  glance  from  him. 
"It  is  a  singular  fascination  that  Rome  exercises  upon 

112 


HAWTHORNE 

artists.  There  is  clay  elsewhere,  and  marble  enough, 
and  heads  to  model,"  he  exclaims,  identifying,  as  usual, 
art  with  sculpture  and  sculpture  with  marble.  Beside 
his  "Note-Books"  Baedeker  reads  like  Gibbon.  His 
own  experiences  amid  the  paraphernalia  of  the  past 
largely  preoccupy  his  pen.  In  the  Louvre,  for  example, 
he  encountered  Catherine  de'  Medici's  dressing-glass, 
"in  which,"  he  records,  "I  saw  my  own  face  where  hers 
had  been."  Profound  thought,  no  doubt,  to  one,  part  of 
whose  originality  consists  in  the  independence  that  can 
cherish  the  banal  as  well  as  the  recondite,  but  devoid 
of  historic  sentiment.  He  would,  however,  have  done 
better  to  confine  himself  to  such  reflections  than  to 
record  such  historic  sentiment  as  he  had.  On  the  latter 
occasions  he  is  apt,  in  familiar  phrase,  to  "get  it  all 
wrong."  The  remains  of  the  Forum,  for  example,  he 
says,  "do  not  make  that  impression  of  antiquity  upon 
me  which  Gothic  ruins  do."  They  certainly  should, 
since  they  are  antique  ruins  and  Gothic  ruins  are  not. 
What,  however,  he  means  by  antiquity  is  the  sense  of 
remoteness,  and  it  is  true  that  classic  remains  seem 
nearer  to  us  than  mediaeval.  But  his  reason  for  it  is 
"because  they  belong  to  quite  another  system  of  society 
and  epoch  of  time,  and  in  view  of  them  we  forget  all 
that  has  intervened  betwixt  them  and  us;  being  morally 
unlike  and  disconnected  with  them,  and  not  belonging 
to  the  same  train  of  thought;  so  that  we  look  across  a 
gulf  to  the  Roman  ages  and  do  not  realize  how  wide 
the  gulf  is."  The  nearness  of  antiquity  to  our  sense 
being  due  precisely  to  our  "  belonging  to  the  same  train 

113 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

of  thought,"  nothing  could  be  more  "mixed"  than 
this — except  (as  Macaulay  would  say)  the  passage 
following,  apropos  of  the  Cathedral  of  Amiens: 

It  is  perhaps  a  mark  of  difference  between  French  and  English 
character,  that  the  Revolution  in  the  former  country  .  .  .  does 
not  seem  to  have  caused  such  violence  to  ecclesiastical  monuments 
as  the  Reformation  and  the  reign  of  Puritanism  in  the  latter.  I 
did  not  see  a  mutilated  shrine,  or  even  a  broken-nosed  image  in 
the  whole  Cathedral.  But,  probably,  the  very  rage  of  the  Eng 
lish  fanatics  against  idolatrous  tokens,  and  their  smashing  blows 
at  them,  were  symptoms  of  sincerer  religious  faith  than  the  French 
were  capable  of.  These  last  did  not  care  enough  about  their 
Saviour  to  beat  down  his  crucified  image. 

Of  the  copious  comment  that  each  of  these  sentences 
almost    automatically    suggests,    the    most    pertinent 
would,  perhaps,  note  the  singularity  that  such  a  Puritan 
as  Hawthorne  should  have  never  heard  of  the  Hugue 
nots,  however  he  might  be  at  sea  about  the  compara 
bility  of  the  English  Revolution  in  the  seventeenth  cen 
tury  with  that  of  the  French  in  the  eighteenth.    However, 
it  is  not  his  speculation  about,  but  his  neglect  of,  history 
that  betrays  a  signal  defect  in  Hawthorne's  culture.     If 
he  withdrew  from  the  world  around  him  it  was  not  into 
the  past  that  he  retired.     He  had  no  more  the  historic 
sense  than  he  had  an  ear  for  music  or  an  eye  for  beauty 
,  — save   in   landscape   of   an   idyllic   character — or  an 
.   „  \^       "j  appreciation  of  art,  or  a  love  of  poetry.     At  least,  if  he 
fTl^    had  them  he  had  them  in  the  germ.     And  he  never  cul- 
\  tivated  the  germ.     His  books  contain  no  evidence  of  an 
interest  in  either  science  or  philosophy.     As  he  lacked 
curiosity,  he  lacked  also   the  enthusiasm  that  is 
114 


HAWTHORNE 

also  a  prerequisite  of  culture.  He  visits  Shakespeare's 
house  unconscious,  he  says,  of  "the  slightest  emotion 
while  viewing  it,  nor  any  quickening  of  the  imagination." 
"It  is  pleasant,  nevertheless,"  he  admits,  "to  think  that 
I  have  seen  the  place."  It  helps  him  to  visualize 
Shakespeare.  Still  he  has  misgivings.  He  is  "not 
quite  certain  that  this  power  of  realization  is  altogether 
desirable  in  reference  to  a  great  poet."  And  he  pro 
ceeds  to  sketch  the  seamy  side  of  Shakespeare  in  quite 
otherwise  dark  colors  than  Mr.  Sidney  Lee  would  coun 
tenance,  concluding  illogically  with  the  moral  that  such 
things  as  he  has  just  recorded  anew  had  better  not  have 
been  discovered.  One  misses  the  "note"  of  culture  in 
his  dispraise  of  Shakespeare  as  one  misses  it  in  his 
eulogy  of  Pierce.  Pierce,  indeed,  enjoyed  a  monopoly 
of  his  enthusiasm,  and,  perhaps,  because  among  our 
public  men  he  was  rather  noteworthy  for  evoking  none 
of  it  in  any  one  else. 

One  field  of  history,  however,  he  knew,  and  knew 
thoroughly.  The  New  England  of  the  early  Puritans 
he  had  studied,  if  not  systematically,  at  any  rate  to  re- 
pletion.  He  had  made  it  his  own.  He  understood  it  as 
a  phase,  of  civilization,  an  epoch,  an  era,  in  the  com 
munity  life  of  the  American  people.  And  if  any  one 
contests  the  value  of  culture,  even  to  a  writer  of  pure 
romance,  a  complete  answer  is  to  be  found  in  the  fact 
that  Hawthorne  succeeded  in  the  main  when  he  dealt 
with  the  Puritans  and  almost  invariably  failed  when  he 
did  not.  There,  he  had  a  background,  material,  and  a 
subject  of  substance. 

115 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 


VII 

"The  Scarlet  Letter"  is  not  merely  a  masterpiece,  it 
is  a  unique  book.  It  does  not  belong  in  the  populous 
category  with  which  its  title  superficially  associates  it, 
and  the  way  in  which  Hawthorne  lifts  it  out  of  this  and 
—without  losing  his  hold  of  a  theme  that  from  the 
beginnings  of  literature  has,  in  the  work  of  the  greatest 
masters  as  well  as  in  that  of  the  most  sordid  practitioners, 
demonstrated  its  vitality  and  significance — nevertheless, 
conducts  its  development  in  a  perfectly  original  way, 
is  indisputable  witness  of  the  imaginative  power  he  pos 
sessed  but  so  rarely  exercised.  So  multifariously  has 
the  general  theme  that  the  scarlet  letter  symbolizes  been 
treated  in  all  literatures  and  by  all  "schools"  from  the 
earliest  to  the  latest,  that  however  its  inexhaustibility 
may  be  thus  attested — an  inexhaustibility  paralleled  by 
that  of  the  perennial  instinct  with  which  it  deals — any 
further  treatment  of  it  must  forego,  one  would  have  said, 
the  element  of  novelty,  at  least.  Hawthorne's  genius  is 
thus  to  be  credited  even  in  this  respect  with  a  remarkable 
triumph.  But  that  it  should  not  only  have  thus  won  a 
triumph  of  originality  by  eluding  instead  of  conquering 
the  banality  of  the  theme — by  taking  it  in  a  wholly  novel 
way,  that  is  to  say — but  have  produced,  in  its  new  de 
parture,  a  masterpiece  of  beauty  and  power,  is  an  accom 
plishment  of  accumulated  distinction.  "The  Scarlet 
Letter,"  in  short,  is  not  only  an  original  work  in  a  field 
where  originality  is  the  next  thing  to  a  miracle,  but  a 

116 


HAWTHORNE 

work  whose  originality  is  in  no  wise  more  marked  than 
its  intrinsic  substance. 

It  is  not  a  story  of  adultery.  The  word  does  not,  I 
think,  occur  in  the  book— a  circumstance  in  itself  typify 
ing  the  detachment  of  the  conception  and  the  delicate 
art  of  its  execution.  But  in  spite  of  its  detachment  and 
delicacy,  the  inherent  energy  of  the  theme  takes  pos 
session  of  the  author's  imagination  and  warms  it  into 
exalted  exercise,  making  it  in  consequence  at  once  the 
most  real  and  the  most  imaginative  of  his  works.  It 
is  essentially  a  story  neither  of  the  sin  nor  of  the  situation 
of  illicit  love — presents  neither  its  psychology  nor  its 
social  effects;  neither  excuses  nor  condemns  nor  even 
depicts,  from  this  specific  point  of  view.  The  love  of 
Hester  and  Dimmesdale  is  a  postulate,  not  a  present 
ment.  Incidentally,  of  course,  the  sin  colors  the  narra 
tive,  and  the  situation  is  its  particular  result.  But,\  /  < 
essentially,  the  book  is  a  story  of  concealment.  Jis  *%*^ 
psychology  is  that  of  the  concealment^  sin  amid  cir-  GO1^ 
cumstances  that  make  a  sin  of  concealment  itself.  The 
sin  itself  might,  one  may  almost  say,  be  almost  any 
other.  And  this  constitutes  no  small  part  of  the  book's 
formal  originality.  To  fail  to  perceive  this  is  quite  to 
misconceive  it.  As  a  story  of  illicit  love  its  omissions 
are  too  great,  its  significance  is  not  definite  enough,  its 
detail  has  not  enough  richness,  the  successive  scenes  of 
which  it  is  composed  have  not  an  effective  enough  co 
hesion.  From  this  point  of  view,  but  for  the  sacred 
profession  of  the  minister  and  the  conduct  this  im 
poses,  it  would  be  neither  moving  nor  profound.  Its 

117 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

moral  would  not  be  convincing.  Above  all,  Chilling- 
1  worth  is  a  mistake,  or  at  most  a  wasted  opportunity. 
For  he  is  specialized  into  a  mere  function  of  malignity, 
and  withdrawn  from  the  reader's  sympathies,  whereas 
what  completes,  if  it  does  not  constitute,  the  tragedy 
of  adultery,  is  the  sharing  by  the  innocent  of  the  pun 
ishment  of  the  guilty.  This  inherent  element  of  the 
situation,  absolutely  necessary  to  a  complete  present 
ment  of  it,  the  crumbling  of  the  innocent  person's 
inner  existence,  is  absolutely  neglected  in  "The  Scarlet 
Letter,"  and  the  element  of  a  malevolent  persecution 
of  the  culpable  substituted  for  it.  The  innocent  person 
thereby  becomes,  as  I  have  already  said,  a  device,  and 
though  in  this  way  Hawthorne  is  enabled  to  vivify 
the  effect  of  remorse  upon  the  minister  by  personifying 
its  furies,  in  this  way,  too,  he  sacrifices  at  once  the  com 
pleteness  of  his  picture  and  its  depth  of  truth  by  disre 
garding  one  of  its  most  important  elements. 

He  atones  for  this  by  concentration  on  the  culpable. 
It  is  their  psychology  alone  that  he  exhibits.  And 
though  in  this  way  he  has  necessarily  failed  to  write  the 
chef-d'ceuvre  of  the  general  subject  that  in  the  field  of  art 
has  been  classic  since  monogamy  established  itself  in 
society,  he  has  produced  a  perfect  masterpiece  in  the 
more  detached  and  withdrawn  sphere  more  in  harmony 
with  his  genius.  In  narrowing  his  range  and  observing 
its  limits  he  has  perhaps  even  increased  the  poignancy 
of  his  effect.  And  his  effect  is  poignant  and  true  as 
reality  itself.  In  confining  himself  to  the  concealment 
of  sin  rather  than  depicting  its  phenomena  and  its  re- 

118 


HAWTHORNE 

suits,  he  has  indeed  brought  out,  as  has  never  been  done 
elsewhere,  the  importance^oMhis  fataLincrement  _pf 
falsity  among  the  factors  oTthewhole  chaotic  and  un- 
stableTmoral  equiliErium.  Concealment  in  "The  Scar 
let  Letter,"  to  be  sure,  is  painted  in  very  dark  colors. 
In  similar  cases  it  may  be  a  duty,  and  is,  at  all  events, 
the  mere  working  of  a  natural  instinct — at  worst  a 
choice  of  the  lesser  evil.  But  surely  there  is  no  exag 
geration  or  essential  loss  of  truth  in  the  suggestion  of  its 
potentialities  for  torture  conveyed  by  the  agony  of  the 
preacher's  double  life.  It  is  true  his  concealment  con 
demned  another  to  solitary  obloquy.  But  if  that  be 
un  typically  infrequent  and  also  not  inherent  in  the  situa 
tion  as  such,  it  is  fairly  counterbalanced  by  consolatory 
thought  of  the  exceptional  havoc  confession  would  have 
wrought  in  his  case.  That  is  to  say,  if  his  remorse  is 
exceptionally  acute  it  is  also  exceptionally  alleviated.- 
On  the  whole  the  potential  torture  of  remorse  for  a  life* 
that  is  flagrantly  an  acted  lie  is  not  misrepresented,' 
either  in  truth  or  art,  by  the  fate  of  Dimmesdale,  though 
it  is  treated  in  the  heightened  way  appropriate  to  the 
typical. 

Concentration  upon  concealment  further  contributes 
to  the  originality  and  the  perfection  of  "The  Scarlet 
Letter"  by  eliminating  passion.  The  sensuous  element 
which  might  have  served  to  extenuate  the  offence — 
since  it  is  of  its  tragic  essence  that  nothing  can  excuse 
it  in  anything  like  normal  conditions — or  if  not  that 
to  render  the  story  attractive  and  affecting,  is  rigidly 
excluded.  There  is  more  sensuousness  sighed  forth  by 

119 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

the  unhappy  pair  of  the  famous  fifth  canto  of  the  "In 
ferno"  than  in  the  whole  volume.  There  is  but  a  single 
reference  to  the  days  when  Hester  and  her  lover  "read 
no  further,"  and  this,  though  a  kindly  and  catholic 
touch,  is  characteristically  a  moral  one. 

With  sudden  and  desperate  tenderness  she  threw  her  arms 
around  him  and  pressed  his  head  against  her  bosom;  little  car 
ing  though  his  cheek  rested  on  the  scarlet  letter.  .  .  . 

"Never,  never,"  whispered  she.  "What  we  did  had  a  con 
secration  of  its  own.  We  felt  it  so!  We  said  so  to  each  other! 
Hast  thou  forgotten  it?" 

"Hush,  Hester!"  said  Arthur  Dimmesdale,  rising  from  the 
ground.  "No;  I  have  not  forgotten." 

There  is  no  sensuous,  scarcely  even  an  emotional, 
digression  from  the  steady  conduct  of  the  theme.  The 
chill  of  destiny  is  sensible  even  in  the  chapter  called 
almost  mockingly  "A  Flood  of  Sunshine,"  and  at  the 
end  to  the  dying  minister  only  doubt  redeems  eternity 
itself  from  despair: 

"Hush,  Hester,  hush!"  said  he,  with  tremulous  solemnity. 
"The  law  we  broke! — the  sin  here  so  awfully  revealed! — let  these 
alone  be  in  thy  thoughts!  I  fear!  I  fear!  It  may  be  that  when 
we  forgot  our  God — when  we  violated  our  reverence  each  for  the 
other's  soul — it  was  henceforth  vain  to  hope  that  we  could  meet 
hereafter,  in  an  everlasting  and  pure  reunion.  God  knows:  and 
He  is  merciful." 

To  this  New  England  "Faust"  there  is  no  "second 
part."  The  sombre  close,  the  scarcely  alleviated  gloom 
of  the  whole  story  are  in  fit  keeping  with  the  theme,— 
which  is  the  truth  that,  in  the  words  of  the  tale  itself, 
"an  evil  deed  invests  itself  with  the  character  of 

120 


HAWTHORNE 

doom" — and  with  its  development  through  the  torture 
of  concealment  to  the  expiation  of  confession. 

Here,  for  once,  with  Hawthorne  we  have  allegory 
richly  justifying  itself,  the  allegory  of  literature  not  that 
of  didacticism,  of  the  imagination  not  of  the  fancy,  alle 
gory  neither  vitiated  by  caprice  nor  sterilized  by  moral 
izing,  but  firmly  grounded  in  reality  and  nature.  Note 
how,  accordingly,  even  the  ways  of  the  wicked  fairy  that 
obsessed  him  are  made  to  serve  him,  for  even  the  mirage 
and  symbolism  so  dear  to  his  mind  and  so  inveterate  in 
his  practice,  blend  legitimately  with  the  pattern  of  his 
thoroughly  naturalistic  fabric.  The  fanciful  element  is, 
at  least,  so  imaginatively  treated  as  to  seem,  exception 
ally,  to  *'  belong."  Hawthorne  seems  to  have  been  so 
"possessed"  by  his  story  as  to  have  conducted  the 
development  of  its  formal  theme  for  once  subcon 
sciously,  so  to  speak,  and  with  the  result  of  decorating 
rather  than  disintegrating  reality  in  its  exposition.  At 
all  events,  to  this  "possession"  (how  complete  it  was  in 
material  fact  all  his  biographers  attest)  two  notable  and 
wholly  exceptional  results  are  due.  In  the  first  place 
he  felt  his  theme,  as  he  never  felt  it  elsewhere,  and  con 
sequently  presented  it  with  an  artistic  cogency  he  never 
elsewhere  attained.  The  story,  in  other  words,  is  real 
and  true.  If  it  is  thought  to  show  a  bias  in  pushing  too  L 
far  the  doom  of  evil,  to  ignore  the  whole  New  Testa 
ment  point  of  view,  as  it  may  be  called,  epitomized  in 
the  Master's  "  Go  and  sin  no  more,"  the  answer  is  that 
though  in  this  way  it  may  lose  in  typical  value,  it  gains 
in  imaginative  realism,  since  it  is  a  story  of  that  Puritan 

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AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

New  England  where  it  sometimes  seems  as  if  the  New 
Testament  had  been  either  suspect  or  unknown.  Be 
sides,  there  is  enough  demonstration  of  its  text  on  the 
hither  side  of  what  it  is  necessary  to  invoke  the  Puritan 
milieu  to  justify.  Every  erring  soul  may  not  suffer  the 
extremity  of  Dimmesdale's  agony,  but  it  suffers  enough, 
and  the  inevitability  of  its  suffering  was  never  more  con 
vincingly  exhibited  than  in  this  vivid  picture,  softened 
as  it  is  into  a  subdued  intensity  by  the  artist's  poetized, 
however  predetermined,  treatment.  For,  in  the  second 
place,  it  is  here  alone  that  Hawthorne  seems  to  have 
felt  his  characters  enough  to  feel  them  sympathetically 
and  so  to  realize  them  to  the  full.  They  are  very  real 
and  very  human.  What  the  imagination  of  a  recluse, 
even,  can  do  to  this  end  when  held  to  its  own  inspiration 
and  not  seduced  into  the  realm  of  the  fantastic,  may  be 
seen  in  the  passage  where  Hester  pleads  for  the  con 
tinued  custody  of  her  child.  Pearl  herself  is  a  jewel  of 
romance.  Nothing  more  imaginatively  real  than  this 
sprite-like  and  perverse  incarnation  of  the  moral  as  well 
as  physical  sequence  of  her  parents'  sin  exists  in  ro 
mance.  Her  individuality  is  an  inspiration  deduced 
with  the  logic  of  nature  and  with  such  happy  art  that  her 
symbolic  quality  is  as  incidental  in  appearance  as  it  is 
seen  to  be  inherent  on  reflection.  Mr.  James,  who 
objects  to  the  symbolism  of  "The  Scarlet  Letter," 
nevertheless  found  her  substantial  enough  to  echo  in 
the  charming  but  far  less  vivid  Pansy  of  his  "Portrait 
of  a  Lady."  Chillingworth,  the  other  symbolic  char 
acter,  is  in  contrast  an  embodied  abstraction — the  one 

122 


HAWTHORNE 

piece  of  machinery  of  the  book.  But  it  cannot  be 
denied  that  he  performs  a  needful  function  and,  artis 
tically,  is  abundantly  justified.  As  a  Puritan  parallel 
of  Mephistopheles  he  is  very  well  handled.  "The 
Scarlet  Letter"  is,  in  fact,  the  Puritan  "Faust,"  and  its 
symbolic  and  allegorical  element,  only  obtrusive  in  a 
detail  here  and  there  at  most,  lifts  it  out  of  the  ordinary 
category  of  realistic  romance  without — since  nothing  of 
importance  is  sacrificed  to  it — enfeebling  its  imaginative 
reality.  The  beautiful  and  profound  story  is  our  chief 
prose  masterpiece  and  it  is  as  difficult  to  overpraise  it 
as  it  is  to  avoid  poignantly  regretting  that  Hawthorne 
failed  to  recognize  its  value  and  learn  the  lesson  it 
might  have  taught  him. 

VIII 

Hawthorne's  style,  doubtless  less  original  than  his 
substance,  is  ^nevertheless  indubitably  his  own.  It  is 
far  more  the  general  cultivated  medium  of  writing  than 
his  works  are  within  the  general  lines  of  romance,  but 
it  is  that  medium  colored  and  modelled — or,  perhaps, 
one  should  rather  say,  tinted  and  traced — by  his  own 
idiosyncrasy.  This  indeed  is  its  importance.  As  style 
it  has  no  other.  Its  hue  and  figure  are  of  interest  as 
their  faintness  and  evenness  mirror  his  personal  traits. 
These  are,  however,  very  crisply  reflected  by  it,  and  a 
study  of  it  is  useful  as  certifying  the  impressions  made 
by  its  substance.  It  is,  to  begin  with,  difficult  to  define, 
and  its  lack  of  positive  qualities  quite  exactly  parallels 

123 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

the  insubstantiality  of  its  subject-matter.  Only  by 
a  miracle,  one  reflects,  could  subject-matter  of  much 
vital  importance  be  thus  habited — so  plainly,  placidly, 
unpretendingly  presented,  though  in  such  an  excep 
tional  instance  as  "The  Scarlet  Letter"  the  latent 
intensity  of  the  theme  is  doubtless  set  off  by  the 
sobriety  of  its  garb,  to  which  also  it  gives  a  deepened 
tone.  But  the  harmonious,  rather  than  contrasting, 
services  of  such  a  style  as  Hawthorne's  in  general,  could 
be  useful  only  for  the  direct  expression  of  something 
bordering  on  informing  insipidity.  It  is  above  all  a  neat 
/I  J^yle-  I*  wears  no  gewgaws  of  rhetoric  and  owes  little  or 
<i  }  nothing  to  the  figures  of  speech.  It  is  saved  from  the 
-V^f ^conventional  mainly  by  the  author's  own  interest  in  its 
Jnfy^f  substance,  and  would  be  prim  if. itwere  nojjjgrsonal. 
But  it  is  too  sincere  forany,  even  Puritan,  affectation. 
Its  neatness  is  a  native,  not  a  cultivated  quality.  It  is 
the  neatness  of  innocence,  not  of  virtue.  It  has  never 
been  assailed  by  the  temptations  of  the  meretricious, 
and  its  avoidance  of  ornament  is  preference  for  the  plain, 
not  distaste  for  the  rococo.  It  views  the  purple  patch 
with  the  unmoved  placidity  of  the  color-blind,  and  the 
staidness  of  its  expression  corresponds  to  the  propriety 
of  its  thought,  whose  wildest  antics  are  decorous  with 
the  consciousness  that  it  is  "all  pretend."  Nothing 
shows  more  clearly  the  dilettante  character  of  Haw 
thorne's  exercise  of  his  fancy  than  this  neatness,  which 
is  never  discomposed  by  fervor  or  thrown  into  disarray 
by  heat. 

It  is  in  fact  the  antithesis  of  heat,  and  the  absence  of 
124 


HAWTHORNE 

heat  in  Hawthorne's  genius  appears  nowhere  so  mark 
edly  as  in  his  style.  His  writings  from  beginning  to  end 
do  not  contain  an  ardent,  or  even  a  fervent  passage. 
They  are  as  empty  of  exaltation  as  of  exhilaration. 
Here,  for  example,  is  a  single  sentence  by  a  fellow- 
townsman  of  his  descriptive  of  one  of  nature's  daily 
phenomena:  "In  deep  ravines,  under  the  eastern  sides 
of  cliffs,  Night  forwardly  plants  her  foot  even  at  noon 
day,  and,  as  Day  retreats,  she  steps  into  his  trenches, 
skulking  from  tree  to  tree,  from  fence  to  fence,  until 
at  last  she  sits  in  his  citadel  and  draws  out  her  forces 
into  the  plain."  No  one  can  read  that  without  recog 
nizing  its  almost  incandescent  quality,  or  compare  it 
with  the  most  glowing  period  to  be  found  in  Haw 
thorne,  without  distinguishing  between  the  imaginative 
flame  that  burned  in  Thoreau's  Walden  cabin  and  the 
flicker  of  fancy  that  played  over  the  embers  of  the 
Old  Manse  hearth.  Or  take  a  few  phrases  inspired 
by  the  little  convent  cemetery  at  Brussels,  the  writer 
of  which 

came  to  this  spot  one  summer  evening  of  spring  and  saw  among 
a  thousand  black  crosses  casting  their  shadows  across  the  grassy 
slope  that  particular  one  which  marked  his  mother's  resting-place. 
...  A  thousand  such  hillocks  lay  round  about,  the  gentle  daisies 
springing  out  of  the  grass  over  them,  and  each  bearing  its  cross 
and  requiescat.  A  nun,  veiled  in  black,  was  kneeling  hard  by  at  a 
sleeping  sister's  bedside  (so  fresh-made  that  the  spring  had  scarce 
had  time  to  spin  a  coverlid  for  it) ;  beyond  the  cemetery  walls  you 
had  glimpses  of  life  and  the  world  and  the  spires  and  gables  of  the 
city.  A  bird  came  down  from  a  roof  opposite,  and  lit  first  on  a 
cross  and  then  on  the  grass  below  it,  whence  it  flew  away  presently 
with  a  leaf  in  its  mouth:  then  came  a  sound  as  of  chanting,  from 

125 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

the  chapel  of  the  sisters  hard  by.  ...  Might  she  sleep  in  peace — 
might  she  sleep  in  peace;  and  we,  too,  when  our  struggles  and 
pains  are  over!  But  the  earth  is  the  Lord's  as  the  heaven  is; 
we  are  alike  his  creatures  here  and  yonder.  I  took  a  little  flower 
off  the  hillock  and  kissed  it,  and  went  my  way,  like  the  bird  that 
had  just  lighted  on  the  cross  by  me,  back  into  the  world  again. 
Silent  receptacle  of  death,  tranquil  depth  of  calm,  out  of  reach  of 
tempest  and  trouble!  I  felt  as  one  who  had  been  walking  below 
the  sea,  and  treading  amid  the  bones  of  shipwrecks. 

To  curtail  this  passage  of  perhaps  the  foremost 
master  of  English  prose  is  to  mutilate  it,  but  I  have 
transcribed  enough  of  it  to  exemplify  precisely  the 
quality  that  Hawthorne's  style  most  conspicuously  and 
most  characteristically  lacks.  It  exemplifies  perfectly 
the  exaltation  of  an  ardent  imagination  constrained  and 
modulated  by  instinctive  artistic  reserve.  It  is  as  far 
removed  from  the  purple  splendors  of  rhetoric  as  Haw 
thorne  at  his  simplest,  but  it  is  simplicity  sublimated 
by  feeling,  not  expressed  with  placid  adequacy.  Imagine 
"the  rarest  imagination  since  Shakespeare"  exclaiming, 
"The  earth  is  the  Lord's!"  He  has  not  the  authority 
requisite  for  such  an  utterance.  He  writes  as  the 
scribes,  and  lacks  the  conviction,  the  assurance  of  his 
vocation,  the  authentic  literary  and  artistic  commission 
for  exclamation  or  utterance  with  any  fire  or  particular 
fervor.  It  is  simply  extraordinary  that  so  voluminous 
a  writer  should  care  so  little  for  writing  as  an  art  of 
effective  expression,  should  practise  it  so  exclusively  as 
an  exercise — as  mere  record  and  statement.  In  "The 
Scarlet  Letter,"  as  I  have  intimated,  the  style  to  a 
certain  extent  reflects  the  greater  depth  and  richness  of 

126 


HAWTHORNE 

the  substance.     But  compare  its  most  moving  passage 
with  the  sentences  just  cited  from  Thackeray: 

They  sat  down  again  side  by  side  and  hand  clasped  in  hand  on 
the  mossy  trunk  of  the  fallen  tree.  Life  had  never  brought  them 
a  gloomier  hour;  it  was  the  point  whither  their  pathway  had  so 
long  been  tending,  and  darkening  ever  as  it  stole  along; — and  yet 
it  enclosed  a  charm  that  made  them  linger  upon  it,  and  claim 
another,  and  another  and,  after  all,  another  moment.  The  forest 
was  obscure  around  them  and  creaked  with  a  blast  that  was  pass 
ing  through  it.  The  boughs  were  tossing  heavily  above  their 
heads;  while  one  solemn  old  tree  groaned  dolefully  to  another, 
as  if  telling  the  sad  story  of  the  pair  that  sat  beneath,  or  con 
strained  to  forebode  evil  to  come 

The  drop — in  tone,  in  spirit  and  in  rhythm — from  real 
elevation  to  that  "one  solemn  old  tree"  groaning 
"dolefully"  and  the  perpetual  symbolism,  is  character 
istic.  It  is  just  what  the  instinct  for  style  would  save 
a  writer  from.  And  it  is  but  a  partial  explanation  to 
attribute  Hawthorne's  lack  of  this  instinct  to  his  lack 
of  plastic  sense.  It  is  explained  ultimately  by  his  lack 
of  real  energy,  to  which  no  doubt  his  lack  of  plastic 
sense  is  itself  due;  though  it  may  be  said  that  his  imagi 
nation,  cool  enough  in  his  view  of  life,  content  to  contem 
plate  instead  of  construct,  seems  to  lose  still  more  heat 
in  his  expression,  and  his  style  to  have  even  less  warmth 
than  his  conceptions.  Evidently,  though  these  amuse, 
they  do  not  impose  upon  him,  and  his  extremely  de 
tached  treatment  of  them  is  the  most  convincing  im 
peachment  of  his  "high  seriousness"  as  a  writer,  how 
ever  sombre,  even,  his  philosophy  of  life. 

And  though  it  is  only  superficially  strange,  it  is  at 
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AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

least  superficially  piquant,  that  his  style  should  disclose 
his  lack  of  ardor  by  its  absence  of  restraint  as  well  as  by 
poverty  of  feeling.  Never  was  such  copiousness  asso 
ciated  with  so  little  exuberance,  or  at  any  rate  exuber 
ance  with  so  little  enthusiasm.  His  simplicity  appears 
thus  as  the  expression  not  of  contained  but  of  uncom 
plicated  substance.  Simple  as  his  style  is  it  is  never 
severe  and  its  quietness  is  not  the  result  of  reserve. 
Just  as  its  purity  is  due  to  the  absence  of  sensuousness 
rather  than  to  spiritual  elevation,  its  simplicity  is  that  of 
a  map  rather  than  that  of  a  picture.  The  fertility  of  his 
fancy  is  not  matched  by  the  subtlety  of  its  expression. 
He  does  not  deal  in  nuances,  but  accumulates  detail. 
No  writer  was  ever  fonder  of  detail.  The  flood  of  it 
drowns  his  descriptions.  One  cannot  trace  the  general 
skeleton,  the  grand  construction.  He  does  not  even 
subordinate  the  trivial,  but  chronicles  everything  that 
occurs  to  him  with  an  amused  and  sportive  assiduity. 
His  personal  taciturnity  disappears  as  he  contemplates 
his  subject  and  he  abandons  himself,  with  more  zest 
than  he  ever  otherwise  betrays,  to  a  kind  of  quaintly 
otiose  but  unmistakable  garrulity.  In  this  respect  not 
his  first  but  his  very  last  story — written  after  a  lifetime 
of  professional  practice — gives  a  very  striking  impression 
of  the  amateur  with  a  pen  in  his  hand  and  endless 
leisure  before  him.  Our  peculiar  Anglo-Saxon  delusion 
of  arguing  inner  intensity  from  outward  composure  can 
find  no  support  in  Hawthorne's  style  for  ascribing  to 
him  any  elements  of  energy  that  are  indicated  by  re 
straint  in  their  expression.  What  his  extreme  copious- 

128 


HAWTHORNE 

ness  witnesses  is  the  diffusion  instead  of  the  concen 
tration  of  his  interest.  His  interest  is  extraordinarily 
spread  out  over  the  rather  narrow  field  that  awakens 
it  at  all  and  perhaps  could  not  be  so  inclusive  if  it 
centred  around  any  cardinal  foci  to  the  disparagement 
of  the  apparently  negligible. 

Such  copiousness  is,  naturally,  inconsistent  with  any 
effective  ordering  of  the  elements  of  style,  and  Haw 
thorne's  is  as  unaccented  periodically  as  it  is  monotonous 
in  color.  But  it  has  the  great  merit  of  ease,  conjoined 
with  exactness.  One  without  the  other  is  not  uncom 
mon,  but  the  combination  is  rare.  The  kind  of  care 
that  goes  with  deliberateness  he  undoubtedly  took, 
though  he  certainly  took  none  that  demanded  strenuous 
and  scrupulous  effort,  or  his  result  would  have  been 
more  distinguished  instead  of  being  purely  satisfactory 
— markedly  felicitous  as  well  as  adequate  and  correct. 
But  his  ease,  thus  untinctured  by  either  study  or  sloth, 
and  marking  the  free  movement  of  a  style  that  is  not 
only  flexible  but  correct,  was  undoubtedly  a  natural 
gift.  He  had  it  in  the  form  that  is  both  academic  and 
elastic.  Hence  his  style  has  in  some  degree  the  classic 
note.  As  free  from  eccentricity  or  excess  as  from  any 
particular  pungency  or  color  it  is  eminently  the  style  of 
literary  good-breeding  and  images  its  author's  personal 
fastidiousness.  Its  vocabulary  is  that  of  cultivated 
English.  It  is  as  free  from  the  crude  as  from  the  far 
fetched.  And  though  often  as  familiar  in  tone  as  it  is 
simple  in  diction  its  smoothness  never  lacks  dignity  and 
often  attains  grace.  Why  has  it  not  in  greater  degree 

129 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

the  truly  classic  note?  Why  is  it  that  after  all — per 
fectly  adapted  as  it  is  to  the  expression  of  its  substance, 
to  the  purpose  of  its  author — it  lacks  quality  and  phys 
iognomy?  Or  at  all  events  why  is  its  quality  not 
more  marked,  more  salient?  Because  it  is  such  an 
adequate  medium  for  its  content,  for  the  expression  of 
a  nature  without  enthusiasm,  a  mind  unenriched  by 
acquisition  and  an  imagination  that  is  in  general  the 
prey  of  fancy  rather  than  the  servant  of  the  will.  Haw 
thorne  should  have  taken  himself  more  seriously  at  the 
outset — in  his  formative  period — and  less  so  in  the 
maturity  of  powers  whose  development  would  have 
produced  far  more  important  results  than  those  achieved 
by  their  leisurely  exercise  in  tranquil  neglect  of  their 
evolution. 


j0&?& 


130 


EMERSON 


EMERSON 


. 

THE  perspective  of  time,  doubtless  for  the  most  part  in 
substantial  alliance  with  equity,  diminishes  many  im 
posing  literaiy  figures,  but  it  has  already  enlarged 
Emerson's.  His  fame  grows.  More  and  more  gen- 
erally,  and  more  and  more  distinctly,  it  is  discerned  as  ^i*^- 
our  answer  to  the  literary  challenge  of  the  world. 
Emerson  is  of  the  company  of  Plato  and  Pascal,  of 
Shakespeare  and  Goethe,  emulating  easily  their  cosmic 
inclusiveness.  And  he  is  ours  —  absolutely  and  alto 
gether  our  own.  If  he  is  not  typically,  he  is  peculiarly, 
American.  Xo  other  country  could  have  produced 
him.  And  his  own  may  take  a  legitimate  satisfaction 
in  the  consciousness  that  its  greatest  is  also  one  of 
its  most  characteristic  minds.  Especially  may  the 
American  lover  of  literature  joy  in  finding  this  intel 
lectual  pre-eminence  illuminating  the  firmament  of 
letters,  rather  than  arising  in  some  field  of  activity 
more  commonly  associated  with  our  character  and 
achievements. 

II 

Except  a  childhood  recollection  of  Lincoln  speaking  \ 
from  a  hotel  balcony  on  his  way  to  his  first  inaugura-  / 
tion  —  of  his  towering  size,  his  energy  in  gesture  and 
emphasis,  his  extraordinary  blackness,  his  angularity 

133 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

of  action,  and  a  certain  imposing  sincerity  of  assertion, 
the  last  very  likely  an  imputation  of  later  years — I  have 
no  memory  of  any  of  our  public  men  more  vivid  than 
that  of  hearing  in  early  youth  a  lecture  by  Emer 
son.  Surely  when  Lowell  called  Lincoln  "the  first 
American"  he  forgot  Emerson.  Or  he  was  thinking 
of  Lincoln's  representative  character  in,  rather  than 
of,  his  country.  Politics  is  "too  much  with  us."  The 
first  American  both  in  chronology  and  in  completeness 
appeared  in  the  field  of  letters,  and — if  we  are,  as  of 
course  Lowell  meant,  to  consider  personal  greatness  in 
the  comparison  and  thus  exclude  Cooper — in  the 
efflorescence  of  New  England  culture.  Naturally  I  do 
not  in  the  least  recall  the  topic  of  Emerson's  lecture.  I 
have  an  impression  that  it  was  not  known  at  the  time 
and  did  not  appear  very  distinctly  in  the  lecture  itself. 
The  public  was  small,  attentive,  even  reverential. 
The  room  was  as  austere  as  the  chapel  of  a  New 
England  Unitarian  church  would  normally  be  in  those 
days.  The  Unitarians  were  the  intellectual  sect  of 
those  days  and,  as  such,  suspect.  Even  the  Unitarians, 
though,  who  were  the  aristocratic  as  well  as  the  in 
tellectual  people  of  the  place,  found  the  chapel  benches 
rather  hard,  I  fancy,  before  the  lecture  was  over,  and  I 
recall  much  stirring.  There  was,  too,  a  decided 
sprinkling  of  scoffers  among  the  audience,  whose 
sentiments  were  disclosed  during  the  decorous  exit. 
Incomprehensibility,  at  that  epoch  generally,  was  the 
great  offence;  it  was  a  sort  of  universal  charge  against 
anything  uncomprehended,  made  in  complete  inno- 

134 


EMERSON 

cence  of  any  obligation  to  comprehend.  Nevertheless 
the  small  audience  was  manifestly  more  or  less  spell 
bound.  Even  the  dissenters — as  in  the  circumstances 
the  orthodox  of  the  day  may  be  called — were  impressed. 
It  might  be  all  over  their  heads,  as  they  contempt 
uously  acknowledged,  or  vague,  as  they  charged,  or 
disintegrating,  as  they — vaguely — felt.  But  there  was 
before  them,  placidly,  even  benignly,  uttering  incendia 
rism,  an  extraordinarily  inTeresluTg  persoriality".  It  was 
evening  and  the  reflection  of  two  little  kerosene  lamps, 
one  on  either  side  of  his  lectern,  illuminated  softly  the 
serenest  of  conceivable  countenances — nobility  in  its 
every  lineament  and  a  sort  of  irradiating  detachment 
about  the  whole  presence  suggestive  of  some  new  kind 
of  saint — perhaps  Unitarian.  There  was  nothing  authori 
tative,  nothing  cathedral  in  his  delivery  of  his  message, 
the  character  of  which,  therefore,  as  a  message  was  dis 
tinctly  minimized;  and  if  nevertheless  it  was  somehow 
clear  that  its  being  a  message  was  its  only  justification, 
it  was  in  virtue  of  its  being,  so  to  say,  blandly  oracular. 
It  was  to  take  or  to  leave,  but  its  air  of  almost  blithe 
aloofness  in  no  wise  implied  anything  speculative  or 
uncertain  in  its  substance — merely,  perhaps,  a  serene 
equability  as  to  your  receptivity  and  its  importance  to 
you.  Communication  was  manifestly  the  last  concern 
of  the  lecturer.  That  was  conspicuously  not  his  affair. 
If,  in  turning  over  the  leaves  of  his  manuscript,  he  found 
they  had  been  misplaced  and  the  next  page  did  not  con 
tinue  his  sentence,  he  proceeded  unmoved,  after  an 
instant's  hesitation,  with  what  it  recorded.  The  hiatus 

135 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

received  but  the  acknowledgment  of  a  half  smile — 
very  gentle,  wise,  and  tolerant.  Nothing  could  better 
emphasize  the  complete  absence  of  pretension  about  the 
entire  performance,  which  thus  reached  a  pitch  of 
simplicity  as  effective  as  it  was  unaffected.  "It  makes 
a  great  difference  to  the  force  of  a  sentence,"  he  says 
somewhere,  "  if  there  is  a  man  behind  it."  Such  lyceum 
technic  cannot  be  considered  exemplary.  But  in  this 
case  the  most  obvious  fact  about  the  lecture  was  that 
there  was  a  man  behind  it.  Conventions  of  presenta 
tion,  of  delivery,  of  all  the  usually  imperative  arts  of 
persuasion — even  of  communication,  as  I  say — seemed 
to  lose  their  significance  beside  the  personal  impressive- 
ness  of  the  lecturer. 

This,  at  all  events,  is  true  of  the  literature  he  pro 
duced — of  his  works  in  both  prose  and  poetry.  His 
life,  his  character,  his  personality — quite  apart  I  mean 
from  the  validity  of  his  precepts — have  the  potency 
belonging  to  the  personality  of  the  founders  of  religions 
who  have  left  no  written  words.  All  the  inconsistencies, 
the  contradictions,  the  paradoxes,  the  inconsequences, 
even  the  commonplaces  of  his  writings  are  absorbed  and 
transfigured  by  his  personal  rectitude  and  singleness. 
One  feels  that  what  he  says  possesses  a  virtue  of  its 
own  in  the  fact  of  having  been  said  by  him.  He  has 
limitations  but  no  infirmities.  He  is  no  creature  of 
legend.  From  cradle  to  grave  his  life  was  known, 
intimately  known,  of  all  men.  There  is  a  wealth  of 
recorded  personal  reminiscence  about  him  and  one 
may  soberly  say  there  has  been  found  "no  fault  in 

136 


EMERSON 

him."  Everything  testified  of  him  explicitly  attests 
this.  "  I  never  heard  of  a  crime  which  I  might  not  have 
committed,"  he  says  (or  cites),  in  speaking  of  "  Faust." 
But  this  was  the  sportiveness  of  his  obsessive  intellect. 
As  a  matter  of  fact  he  never  committed  any — not 
even  the  most  venial  error.  Nor  was  his  blameless- 
ness  in  the  least  alloyed  with  weakness.  His  energy 
was  as  marked  as  his  rectitude.  He  had  the  dauntless 
courage  of  the  positively  polarized — as  he  might  say — 
and  in  no  wise  illustrated  the  negative  virtues  of  pas 
sivity.  He  is  of  our  time,  of  our  day,  he  lived  and 
wrote  but  yesterday  at  Concord,  Massachusetts,  he 
passed  through  the  most  stirring  times,  he  shared,  with 
whatever  spiritual  aloofness,  the  daily  life  of  his  fellows 
and  neighbors  and  was  part  and  parcel  of  a  modern 
American  community  for  nearly  four  score  years,  and 
never  in  any  respect  or  in  the  slightest  degree,  in  any 
crisis  or  any  trivial  detail  of  humdrum  existence,  failed 
to  illustrate — to  incarnate — the  ideal  life.  Introducing 
his  lectures  on  "The  Ideal  in  Art, "  Taine  exclaims  elo 
quently:  "It  seems  as  if  the  subject  to  which  I  am 
about  to  invite  your  attention  could  only  be  treated  in 
poetry."  Similarly,  one  feels  in  approaching  any  con 
sideration  of  Emerson  that  his  character  is  such  as  to 
implicate  a  lyric  strain.  Criticism  is  exalted  into  pure 
appreciation.  Not  only  is  there  no  weakness,  no  lack 
of  heroic  ideality  in  his  life  and  conduct,  but  neither 
is  there  in  his  writings.  Not  only  every  poem,  every 
essay,  but  every  sentence,  one  may  almost  say,  is 
fairly  volatile  in  its  aspiration  toward  the  ideal.  His 

137 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

practical  admonitions  and  considerations — and  his 
works  are  full  of  these — all  envisage  the  empyrean. 
His  homeliest  figures  and  allusions  direct  the  mind  to 
the  zenith  and  never  stop  at  the  horizon.  And  this 
incarnation  of  the  ideal  is  a  Massachusetts  Yankee, 
for  he  was  absolutely  nothing  else.  I  know  of  nothing 
in  the  history  of  literature,  or  in  history  itself,  more 
piquant  as  an  indifferent,  more  inspiring  as  a  patriotic, 
critic  would  say.  Emerson  is,  as  I  have  said,  our 
refutation  of  alien  criticism,  grossly  persuaded  of  our 
materialism  and  interestedness.  To  "mark  the  per 
fect  man  "  has  been  left  to  America  and  American  litera 
ture. 

Ill 

i       Note  moreover   that  Emerson's  moral  greatness — 
.  most  conspicuous  of  all  facts  about  him,  as  I  think  it 

is — receives  its  essentially  individual  stamp,  aside  from 
its  perfection,  from  its  indissoluble  marriage  with  intel- 

Xlect.  When  he  left  his  church  he  took  his  pulpit  with 
him.  He  preached  throughout  his  life.  And  he  did 
,  M  nothing  but  preach;  even  his  poetry  is  preaching.  Of 
.  j(  course,  his  sermons  are  lay  sermons.  There  is,  I  think, 
rather  a  marked  absence  of  the  religious  element  in 
them.  But  the  ethical  note  sounds  through  them  all. 
He  discovers  the  moral  in  the  bosom  of  the  rose,  and  of 
art  itself  finds  its  chief  value  to  be  the  teaching  of  his 
tory.  His  distinction,  his  true  originality,  is  missed  if 
this  is  not  perceived.  As  a  man  of  letters,  an  Artist,  a 
Poe^  a  philosopher,  a  reformer,  he  has  limitations  that 


EMERSON 

it  is  impossible  to  deny.  As  a  preacher — a  lay  preacher  ™ 
— he  is  unsurpassed.  Since  the  days  of  the  Hebrew 
prophets,  whom  temperamentally  he  in  no  wise  re 
sembled,  there  has  been  no  such  genius  devoted  to  the 
didactic.  He  was  quite  conscious  of  his  mission.  "I 
have  my  own  spirits  in  prison,"  he  says,  "spirits  in 
deeper  prisons  whom  no  man  visits  if  I  do  not."  Con 
fident  in  his  sublimated  pantheism,  feeling  himself  an 
organic  constituent  of  the  universal  substance,  the 
authenticity  of  his  didactic  title  was,  one  may  almost 
say,  more  a  matter  of  consciousness  than  of  assumption 
with  him.  His  capacity  was  not  so  much  representa 
tive  as  original.  He  was  not  so  much  a  delegate  of 
the  divine  as  a  part  of  it,  and  consequently  scorned 
credentials  as  he  did  exposition  and  spoke  ex  proprio 
vigore. 

His  distinction  as  a  preacher,  however,  is  not  the 
authority  with  which  he  speaks — others  have  spoken 
as  authoritatively — but  that,  though  preaching  always, 
his  appeal  is  always  to  the  mind.  He  never  pleads, 
adjures,  warns,  only  illuminates.  He  may  talk  of 
other  gods,  his  Zeus  is  intellect.  The  hand  may  be 
Isaiah's,  the  voice  is  that  of  the  intelligence.  "The 
capital  secret  of  the  preacher's  profession,"  he  says,  "is 
to  convert  life  into  truth."  These  five  words  define 
his  own  work  in  the  world  with  precision.  And  his 
instrument,  his  alembic,  for  this  conversion  was  the 
intellect.  Treating  moral  questions,  or  questions  which 
by  extension  are  to  be  so  called,  almost  exclusively,  he 
treats  them  without  reference  to  any  criterion  but  that 

139 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

of  reason.  Pure  intellect  has  never  received  such 
homage  as  he  pays  it.  Its  sufficiency  has  never  seemed 
so  absolute  to  any  other  thinker.  "See  that  you  hold 
yourself  fast," — by  the  heart,  the  soul,  the  will  ?  No, — 
"by  the  intellect,"  is  the  climax  of  one  of  his  earliest 
and  most  eloquent  preachments.  The  strain  is  recur 
rent  throughout  his  works.  "Goethe  can  never  be 
dear  to  men,"  he  says,  with  his  extraordinary  penetra 
tion.  "His  is  not  even  the  devotion  to  pure  truth: 
but  to  truth  for  the  sake  of  culture."  He  would  have 
blandly  scouted  Lessing's  famous  preference  for  the 
pursuit  over  the  possession  of  truth,  and  was  far  from 
"bowing  humbly  to  the  left  hand"  of  the  Almighty  and 
saying,  "Father,  forgive:  pure  truth  is  for  Thee  alone." 
He  never  pursued  truth — or  anything.  He  simply 
uttered  it,  with  perfect  modesty  but  also  with  absolute 
conclusiveness.  He  never  pretended  to  completeness, 
to  the  possession  of  all  truth.  "Be  content  with  a  little 
light,  so  it  be  your  own,"  he  counsels  the  youthful 
"scholar."  He  was  imperturbably  content  with  his; 
it  was  indubitably  his  own,  and  he  trusted  it  implicitly. 
To  increase  one's  store  of  light  he  prescribes  a  "position 
of  perpetual  inquiry"  and  commends  not  study  but 
examination,  exclaiming  eloquently,  "Explore,  and 
explore!"  What  with?  Under  whose  guidance ?  That 
of  your  intellect  of  course.  He  is  in  essential  agree 
ment  with  Carlyle,  in  calling  the  light  of  the  mind  "  the 
direct  inspiration  of  the  Almighty" — except  that  he 
would  have  substituted  Nature  for  the  Almighty,  to 
whom  his  references  are  as  few  as  Carlyle's  are  frequent. 

140 


EMERSON 


Moreover  it  was  the  pure,  as  distinguished  from  the 
practical,  intellect  that  he  worshipped.  Naturally,  since  it 
was  this  that  he  possessed.  He  himself  admits,  or  rather 
proclaims,  that  his  "reasoning  faculty  is  proportionally 
weak."  Logic  was  apparently  discovered  by  Aristotle 
and  Emerson  is  a  pure  Platonist.  He  cites  the  Stagirite 
when  it  serves  his  Platonist  purpose — for  example, 
the  beautifully  Platonist  definition  of  art  as  "  the  reason 
of  things  without  their  substance" — but  he  has  no  native 
sympathy  with  him.  He  is  in  fact  Plato  redivivus  in 
his  assumption  that  coj^ej^^n^^  and 

prove  themselves;  or  rather,  that  all  kinds  of  proof  are 

M. '"  _— — —-—  '     ""  '    """"'  * 

impertinent.  Logic7Tnaeed,  has  been  superstitiously 
overvalued.  It  has  been  responsible  for  an  enormous 
amount  of  absolutely  artificial  error,  as  one  need  go  no 
farther  than  to  remember  Aristotle's  despotic  rule 
during  the  Middle  Ages — still  persisting  in  both  Roman 
and  Protestant  ecclesiasticism — to  recall.  fSl  the  sani 
\  time,  quite  apart  from  its  pretensions  as  a  science,  it  h 
1  the  supreme  value  of  being  the  only  test  which  we  ma 
*  apply  to  the  verification  of  our  otherwise  unestablish 
intuitions.]  TheroTe^of  verification,  however,  is  alto 
gether  too  humble  to  win  respect  from  such  an  Olympian 
spirit  as  Emerson.  He  speaks  always  as  little  like  the 
logicians  as  the  scribes.  Not  only  his  practice — which 
others  have  shared — but  his  theory,  in  which  he  is  unique 
among  the  serious  philosophers  of  the  modern  world, 
is  quite  definitely  that  of  the  seer.  However  blandly, 
however  shrewdly,  he  unfolds  his  message,  he  has  con 
sciously  and  explicitly  as  well  as  inferentially  the  at- 

141 


»    Qfl 
Jr 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 


titude  of  merely  transmitting  it.  More — far  more— 
than  that,  for  with  his  inveterate  didacticism  he  in 
sists  that  this  attitude  be  universal.  Abstract  yourself 
sufficiently,  he  seems  to  say  to  his  audience,  and  let 
the  god  speak  through  you.  Then  all  will  be  well.  To 
what  purpose  ?  Well,  to  no  purpose,  except  the  end  of 
the  formulation  of  truth.  Truth  he  viewed  almost  as 
a  commodity.  If  you  could  but  get  enough  life  con 
verted  into  truth,  there  would  be  nothing  left  to  ask  for. 
That  would  be  the  legitimate  end  and  conclusion  of 
effort,  because — though  of  course  he  never  stooped  to 
assign  any  reason  for  assuming  the  all-sufficiency  of 
truth — since  error  is  blindness,  once  perceived  it  won't 
be  followed.  He  is,  I  confess,  a  little  exasperating  in 
his  airy  avoidance  of  this  "conclusion  of  the  whole 
matter."  Even  artistic  completeness — for  which,  how 
ever,  he  had  no  sense — seems  to  require  it.  Logic  also; 
axiomatically  the  highest  good  is  goodness.  But  doubt 
less  there  are  plenty  of  people  to  draw  conclusions. 
Emerson  was  concerned  mainly  with  premises — even 
major  premises.  The  utilities  he  in  general  abhorred. 
There  were  in  effect  too  many  people  to  attend  to  them; 
to  say  nothing  of  the  notorious  fact  that  they  would 
take  care  of  themselves.  The  important  thing  was,  as 
one  may  say,  to  illustrate  Tennyson's  exquisite  image, 

"  Now  lies  the  earth  all  Danae  to  the  stars," 

and  let  the  divine  interpenetrate  and  fecundate  human 
deliverances  on  any  subject — as  little  alloyed  as  possible 
with  any  ratiocination  or  other  obstruction  of  pure 

142 


EMERSON 

transmission.  In  Emerson's  case  we  know  who  the  god 
was — even  his  name  and  address.  His  utterances  are 
too  highly  differentiated  for  mistake.  The  divine  voice  ClVy  rp>- 
is  of  course  one.  All  things  are  one  to  Emerson.  But 
the  one  in  this  instance  seems  sufficiently  distinguished 
from  its  other  articulatenesses  to  involve  a  polytheistic 
rather  than  a  generally  immanent  explanation.  To  us 
the  god  is  inescapably  Emerson  himself;  it  is  at  least 
excusable,  practically,  to  identify  what  you  find  in  no 
other  conjunction.  Naturally  the  inference  is  that  we 
are  all  gods,  and  no  doubt  Emerson  would  willingly  have 
adopted,  with  whatever  modifications,  the  current "  pan- 
entheism  "  which  unites  his  pantheism  with  theism,  for 
though  he  never  lost  sight  of  the  existence  of  the  many 
he  always  saw  them  as  ultimately  resident  in  the  one. 
In  this  case  we  have  only  to  say  that  Emerson  was  a 
most  superior  kind  of  god,  or  in  other  words — hardly 
more  specific  perhaps,  but  more  in  accord  with  current 
parlance — that  he  was  a  man  of  genius.  However, 
genius  too  has  its  privileges,  whether  divine  in  the  /v  fr> 
transcendental  or  in  the  merely  literary  sense.  And 
one  of  them  is  notoriously  independence  of  logic.  Of 
this  practical  privilege  he  took  the  amplest  advantage. 
"Wejcaanot_  spend  the  day  in  explanation,"  he  says 
theocratically.  There  is  no  syllogism  in  all  his  essays 
— not  even,  I  fancy,  a  "  therefore."  There  is  no  attempt 
to  argue,  to  demonstrate  even  statements  and  positions 
that  almost  seem  to  cry  out  for  such  treatment.  It  is  all 
distinctly  facultative,  but  all  instinct  with  the  authority 
of  the  Hebrew  prophets,  the  ex  cathedra  tone  of  the 

143 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

inspired  or  even  the  possessed.  As  I  have  intimated, 
the  contrast  between  this  tone — this  assumption — and 
the  frequently  homely,  workaday,  Yankee  expression 
of  it  is  particularly  picturesque.  In  general  the 
prophets  are  in  the  distance — enwrapped  in  the  mists 
of  legend  or  enlarged  in  the  mirage  of  remoteness. 

Naturally,  thus,  his  inconsistencies  are  striking — even 
glaring — but  they  are  not  as  significant  as  superficially 
they  may  be  esteemed.  They  are  in  the  first  place 
often  superficial  in  themselves,  and  anyone  who  takes 
the  trouble — as,  in  his  lofty  way,  Emerson  would  have 
scorned,  did  in  fact  scorn,  to  do — can  reconcile  them  by 
the  exercise  of  attentive  discrimination  and,  above  all, 
of  cordial  good  faith.  I  say  "cordial,"  because  good 
will  is  needful  to  illuminate  even  essential  perspicacity 
when  on  the  surface  of  things  the  case  might  so  easily 
be  adversely  adjudicated.  In  reading  over  the  Essays 
recently  I  must  confess  I  have  been  extraordinarily 
impressed  by  the  frequency  of  these  apparent  inconsist 
encies.  One  grows  tired  of  noting  them.  Cumula 
tively  they  convey  the  impression  of  irresponsibility. 
Consistency,  one  says  vainly  to  oneself,  is  the  vice 
of  feeble  minds;  indulged  to  this  extent,  it  almost 
suggests  the  spoBtiveness  of  literary  bohemia.  But, 
' after  a  time — an  apprenticeship  one  may  say — you 
J  perceive  that  inconsistency  is  inseparable  from  Emer- 
' son>s  metn°d.  If  a  record  had  been  kept  of  the 
oracles  of  Delphi,  would  they  have  been  found  to 
hang  together?  Besides,  the  Pythia,  however  ab 
stractly,  dealt  with  the  concrete.  She  was  not  con- 

144 


EMERSON 

signed,  like  Emerson,  to  the  oracular  in  general,  so 
to  speak — the  oracular  apropos  of  every  imaginable 
abstract  consideration.  On  the  whole  it  seems  too 
much  to  ask  that  the  oracular  should  also  be  con 
sistent.  Too  much  ingenuity  would  be  requisite  to 
make  it  so,  and  the  association  of  ingenuity  with 
oracle  involves  a  contradiction  in  terms.  The  mouth 
piece  of  the  god  is  not  concerned  about  matching  its 
inspirations.  If  ever  there  existed  a  seer  whose  mental 
activity  was  in  a  perpetual  state  of  ferment,  Emerson 
was  such  a  one.  Yet  he  conceived  of  himself  as  a 
passive  medium  of  transmission  for  divine  messages 
to  humanity.  He  conceived  thus  of  everyone  worth 
attention  at  all  in  the  intellectual  world,  and  even 
commended  the  attitude  to  the  humblest  of  his  audi 
ences.  Why  not,  indeed,  if  the  farmer  to  whom  he 
lent  a  volume  of  Plato  returned  it  with  the  reassuring 
remark/ 'He  seems  to  have  a  good  many  of  my  idees"  ? 
We  speak  of  a  mercurial  temperament,  but  really 
temperament  is  a  constant  quantity  compared  with  the 
intellect,  pure  and  simple,  unbalanced  by,  unweighted 
with,  its  steady  pull  and  pressure.  Logic  itself  hardly 
takes  its  place  as  a  check  on  the  irresponsible  and  the 
experimental.  And,  as  I  say,  Emerson  eschewed  logic. 
Obviously  either  logic  or  feeling  is  requisite  for  the 
control  of  intellectual  caprice — a  phenomenon  mainly 
noticeable  in  the  unsentimental  and  the  active-minded: 
precisely  Emerson's  category.  And  the  thinker  who 
frames  a  system  or  even  compasses  a  coherent  body  of 
doctrine  is  probably  indebted  even  more  than  to  his 

145 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

logic  to  those  general  appetences  that  make  up  a  tem 
peramental  personality.  Left  to  itself,  without  concern 
for  consequences  either  to  logic  or  predilection,  the 
intellect  is  tremendously  adventurous,  and  as  hospitable 
to  the  strange  and  the  subversive  as  the  nomad  or  the 
outlaw.  Emerson  had  a  splendid  scorn  for  the  conse 
quences  of  any  of  his  thinking.  His  thinking  was  in 
truth  a  series  of  perceptions,  so  directly  visible  to  his 
mind — undirected  by  any  bent,  unsteadied  by  any 
controlling  prejudice,  so  unselected  temperamentally 
that  is  to  say — as  to  need  no  matching  or  comparison, 
no  holding  in  abeyance,  no  tentative  consideration 
preliminary  to  complete  adoption.  With  him  modifica 
tion  means  a  new  view,  more  light,  still  another  percep 
tion.  Philosophically  thus,  and  constitutionally,  this 
preacher  of  individuality  is  himself  the  most  impersonal 
of  individuals.  Everyone  in  his  entourage,  everyone 
who  came  in  contact  with  him,  noted,  in  the  measure 
of  his  powers  of  analysis,  the  absence  in  him  of  the 
element  of  personality — the  element  par  excellence  that 
centralizes,  unifies,  and  renders  communicable  any  set 
of  ideas,  or  even  any  particular  point  of  view.  Mile. 
Dugard  says  of  him  very  truly:  "II  realise  avec 
sere'nite'  le  type  de  1'objectif  dont  Tame  est  une  forme 
vide  que  traverse  1'influx  divin."  He  is  himself  as 
elusive  as  his  philosophy  is  fluid.  His  own  introspec 
tion,  busy  enough  with  his  mind  and  seeing  the  universe 
in  as  well  as  through  it,  pauses  at  the  threshold  of  his 
nature  and,  instinctively  shrinking  from  looking  for 
fixity  in  anything  so  subtly  undetermined,  even  pro- 

146 


EMERSON 

fesses  ignorance  of  its  constitution.  The  matter,  how 
ever,  was  probably  simpler  than  with  his  mystic  turn 
he  was  ready  to  admit.  His  nature  was  flooded  with 
light,  but  it  lacked  heat.  It  had  animation  without 
ardor,  exaltation  without  ecstasy. 

His  deification  of  intellect,  indeed,  inevitably  in 
volves  a  corresponding  deficiency  in  susceptibility,  and 
defective  sympathies  are  accordingly — and  were  as  a 
matter  of  fact  with  him — as  characteristic  of  Emerson's 
order  of  moral  elevation  as  is  this  one  enthusiasm  to 
which  his  susceptibility  limited  him.  Distinctly  he 
lacked  temperament.  His  was  a  genial  but  hardly  a 
cordial  nature — in  personal  relations,  indeed,  more 
amiable  even  than  genial.  As  he  says,  "the  intellect 
searches  out  the  absolute  order  of  things  as  they  stand 
in  the  mind  of  God,  and  without  the  colors  of  affection." 
"Something  is  wanting  to  science  until  it  has  been 
humanized,"  he  asserts,  but  by  humanization  he  means 
"union  with  intellect  and  will" — quite  formally  neglect 
ing  the  susceptibility,  the  necessary  transition  between 
the  two.  Will  comes  next  to  intellect  in  his  esteem — 
he  praises  action  on  occasion — but  it  is  a  distant  second. 
Virtue  itself,  he  says,  "is  vitiated  by  too  much  will." 
He  was  poise  personified,  and  both  will  and  feeling 
impair  equilibrium.  The  ether  that  he  breathed  habit 
ually  was  too  rarefied  a  medium  for  the  affections  to 
thrive  in.  He  was  in  love  only  with  the  ideal — and  the 
ideal  as  he  conceived  it,  that  is,  "the  absolute  order  of 
things."  In  all  human  relations,  even  the  closest,  a 
certain  aloofness  marks  his  feeling.  As  to  this  the 

147 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

testimony  is  unanimous.  It  was  far  from  being  shyness 
in  the  sense  of  diffidence.  He  did  not  know  what 
diffidence  was.  On  the  contrary,  it  proceeded  from  an 
acute  sense  of  self-respect.  Mr.  Cabot's  Memoir  con 
tains  a  delicious  letter  to  Margaret  Fuller,  who  sighed 
for  more  reciprocity  in  him.  Plainly  he  was  to  be 
neither  wheedled  nor  bullied  into  intimacy.  He  was 
himself  quite  conscious  of  his  innate  unresponsiveness 
— as  indeed  what  was  there  that  escaped  his  all-em 
bracing,  all-mirroring  consciousness?  He  was  twice 
married,  and  received  his  life  long  the  deferential  devo 
tion  of  family  and  friends.  But  he  undoubtedly  felt 
that  "my  Father's  business" — or  his  equivalent  for  it — 
had  claims  upon  his  preoccupation  superior  to  theirs. 
The  essence  of  love  is  self-abandonment,  and  such  an 
attitude  is  quite  foreign  to  him.  It  was  in  fact  incon 
sistent  with  his  idea  of  the  dignity  and  importance  of 
his  own  individuality,  which  he  cherished  with  a  single 
ness  quite  exactly  comparable  with  the  saint's  subordi 
nation  of  all  earthly  to  divine  affection.  He  did  not 
care  enough  for  his  friends  to  discriminate  between 
them — which  I  imagine  is  the  real  reason  for  the  ex 
traordinary  estimate  of  Alcott  that  has  puzzled  so  many 
of  his  devotees.  Aloofness  is  no  respecter  of  persons. 
Seen  from  a  sufficient  height  ordinary  differences  tend 
to  equalization.  He  shrank  even  from  having  fol 
lowers  and  all  his  friends  felt  his  detachment.  He 
was  silent  for  the  most  part  in  company — not  con 
strained,  not  abstracted,  just  resting,  one  fancies,  in  a 
temporary  surcease  of  meditative  activity.  And  at 

148 


EMERSON 

home,  he  says,  "  Most  of  the  persons  I  see  in  my  own 
house  I  see  across  a  gulf." 

Such  temperamental  composure  it  is  perhaps  that 
saves  him  from  the  fanaticism  regnant  around  him 
through  much  of  his  life,  and  more  or  less  directly 
derived  from  the  disintegration  of  conservatism  whose 
elements  he  had  himself  set  free.  We  owe  him  our 
intellectual  emancipation  in  all  of  its  results,  no  doubt. 
But  he  himself  never  lost  his  equilibrium.  His  enthusi 
asms  did  not  enthrall  him,  nor  did  he  ever  become  the 
slave  even  of  his  own  ideas.  Of  theories  he  had  prac-  f  «JL 
tically  none.  And  his  lack  of  fixity  was  not  only  too 
integral  for  fanatical  determination  but  too  frigid  for 
volcanic  disturbance.  Common  sense — of  the  rec-  "It  evd*^ 
ognizably  Yankee  variety — was  less  his  balance-wheel  ™ 
than  a  component  part  of  his  nature,  and  gives  to  his 
intellect  its  marked  turn  for  wisdom  rather  than  specula 
tion.  It  is  this  element  in  his  writings  that  prevents 
his  oracular  manner  from  arousing  distrust  and  makes 
his  paradoxical  color  seem  merely  the  poetizing  of  the 
literal.  On  all  sorts  of  practical  things  he  says  the 
last  word — the  last  as  well  as  the  fin  mot.  With  the 
eloquence  and  enthusiasm  of  youth — no  writer  is  so 
perennially  young — he  had  the  coolness  of  age;  and  this 
coolness  is  as  marked  in  his  earliest  as  in  his  latest 
writings,  which  indeed  show  increased  mellowness  and 
a  winning  kind  of  circumspect  geniality.  But,  to  adopt 
the  terms  he  himself  would  have  sanctioned,  if  not  em 
ployed,  his  susceptibility  was  really  stirred  by  the  reason 
alone — the  self-knower,  the  organ  of  immediate-behold- 

149 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

ing — and  was  in  no  wise  responsive,  even  in  dealing 
with  the  most  practical  matters,  to  the  conclusions  of  the 
understanding,  or  the  report  of  the  senses.  "There  is 
no  doctrine  of  the  Reason,"  he  exclaims  with  tender 
fervor,  "  which  will  bear  to  be  taught  by  the  Under 
standing."  Being  thus  stimulated  in  the  main  by  only 

portion  (to  speak  anciently  again)  of  his  beloved 
intellect,  his  feelings  really  glowed,  one  may  say,  within 
extraordinarily  narrow  limits.  When  he  could  exercise 
his  Vernunft  in  complete  neglect  of  his  Verstand  he 
reached  the  acme  of  his  exaltation.  The  direct  per 
ception  of  truth — meaning,  of  course,  moral  truth — 
suffused  him  with  something  as  near  the  ecstasy  he  so 
often  seems  to  aspire  to  without  ever  quite  reaching,  as 
his  extremely  self-possessed  temperament  would  suffer. 
"  God,  or  pure  mind,"  is  one  of  his  phrases,  incidental 
but  abundantly  defining  his  conception  of  Deity,  and  it 
is  this  central  conception  that  colors  his  philosophy  and 
on  its  religious  side  makes  it  so  strictly  ethical. 

Professor  Woodberry — whose  "Life  of  Emerson"  is 
in  my  judgment  not  only  a  masterly  study  of  a  difficult 
subject  but  one  of  our  few  rounded  and  distinct  literary 
masterpieces — maintains  that  Emerson  is  essentially 
religious.  I  cannot  myself  see  it.  Perhaps  it  is  a  ques 
tion  of  definition,  but  surely  it  is  an  accepted  idea  that 
religion  is  a  matter  of  the  heart,  and  one  is  confident 
that  no  religious  or  other  emotion  ever  seriously  dis 
turbed  the  placid  alternation  of  systole  and  diastole  in 
Emerson's.  It  is  fortunate  probably  that  it  is  so  little 
a  matter  of  the  intellect;  otherwise  the  mass  of  mankind 

150 


EMERSON 

whom  it  guides  and  consoles  in  one  way  or  another, 
tant  bien  que  mat,  would  distinctly  be  losers.  The  wise 
and  prudent  themselves,  as  a  matter  of  fact,  to  which 
class  Emerson  eminently  belonged,  have  mainly  mani 
fested  a  susceptibility  to  it  in  virtue  of  that  side  of  their 
nature  which  they  share  with  the  babes  to  whom  it  has 
been  revealed.  What  the  unaided  intellect  has  ever 
done  for  it,  except  by  way  of  occasionally  divesting  it 
of  the  theology  it  had  previously  encumbered  it  with,  is 
difficult  to  see.  Certainly  no  secular  writer,  even,  ever 
cared  less  about  it,  however  defined — unless  it  be  relig 
ious  to  aggrandize  the  moral  sentiment  and  insist  on  it 
as  the  summum  bonum  and  the  supremo,  lex  of  life — than 
Emerson.  Matthew  Arnold  called  it  "  the  most  lovable 
of  things,"  though  in  describing  it  as  "  morality  touched 
by  emotion  "  he  seemed  to  many  to  eliminate  its  divine  and 
therefore  most  characteristic  sanction.  With  Emerson 
neither  morality  nor  anything  else  is  "  touched  by  emo 
tion  "  in  any  other  sense  than  that  of  exaltation.  He  coun 
sels  the  "scholar"  to  be  "cold  and  true."  And  though 
on  the  other  hand  he  is  in  constant  communication 
with  the  divine  element  in  nature,  what  he  understands 
by  this  is  not  the  power  that  makes  for  righteousness, 
but  mind — universal  mind,  whose  sole  manifestation  is 
not  goodness,  or  beauty,  but  truth,  of  which  goodness  is 
altogether  a  concomitant,  and  beauty  a  mere  manifesta 
tion.  "  No  law  can  be  sacred  to  me  but  that  of  my  own 
nature.  Good  and  bad  are  but  names  very  readily 
transferable  to  this  or  that;  the  only  right  is  what  is  after 
my  constitution,  the  only  wrong  what  is  against  it." 

151 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

IV 

It  would,  indeed,  be  hardly  too  fanciful  to  find 
Emerson's  philosophy  very  considerably  derived  from 
the  natural  man  in  him — using  the  terms  in  the  "ortho 
dox"  theological  sense  and  not  in  his  nor  in  Rousseau's. 
Bland  angel  as  he  was,  he  very  much  wanted  his  own 
way.  One  is  tempted  to  say  that  he  invented  or  elected 
his  philosophy  in  order  to  get  it.  At  all  events  it 
exactly  suited  him.  He  had  no  sentimental  needs.  It 
satisfies  none.  He  had,  to  an  inordinate  degree — as 
how  should  he  not  have? — the  pride  of  intellect.  It 
magnifies  mind.  He  was  assailed  by  no  temptations, 
knew  no  "  law  of  the  members."  It  contemplates  none. 
He  was  impatient  of  constraint.  It  exalts  freedom. 
He  suffered  from  the  pressure  of  traditional  supersti 
tion.  It  lauds  the  leading  of  individual  light.  He  felt 
acutely,  with  an  extraordinary  and  concentrated  inten 
sity,  the  value,  the  importance,  the  dignity  of  his  own 
soul.  It  invents  the  "over  soul" — surely  an  exercise 
in  terminology! — to  authenticate  it.  The  natural  man, 
however  understood,  is  the  undisciplined  man.  And 
discipline  is  precisely  the  lacking  element  in  his  philo 
sophy.  The  philosophers  are  very  impatient  with  it. 
One  of  them,  certainly  one  of  the  most  instinctive,  eru 
dite  and  expert  of  American  members  of  the  guild — 
practitioners  of  the  art,  I  was  about  to  say — informs  me 
that  "  no  one  who  has  worshipped  in  the  shrine  of  Kant 
can  put  up  with  that  loose  sort  of  practical  'philosophy'." 
"Practical"  in  his  view  is  manifestly  not  a  laudatory 

152 


EMERSON 

epithet  for  philosophy — Carlyle's  "moonshine"  indeed, 
more  so.  But  so  far  as  Emerson  himself  was  con 
cerned  I  suspect  that  it  is  an  exact  one;  for  him  it 
was  extremely  practical,  even  essential.  In  the  silver 
shimmer  of  his  "moonshine"  the  whole  moral  world 
lay  argently  if  not  effulgently  illuminated,  and  if  ob 
jective  truths  were  not  revealed  in  their  completeness, 
they  were  essentially  defined  with  a  shadow  both  sharper 
in  outline  and  fuller  of  suggestiveness  than  sunlight 
secures  or  permits.  Logic  has  been  said — not  very 
scientifically,  it  is  true — to  be  a  justification  of  one's 
instincts.  But  vigorously  and  indeed  airily  eschewing 
logic  as  it  does,  Emerson's  philosophy  may  nevertheless 
be  called  the  justification  of  his  intuitions  to  himself  in 
more  or  less  obscure  logical  fashion;  concatenated  in 
tuitions  involve  a  kind  of  deductive  logic.  Essentially 
novel  his  ideas  cannot  be  called — though  it  should  be 
said  that  he  never  claims  novelty  for  them,  merely 
advancing  them,  in  serene  independence,  and  disregard 
of  their  to  him  doubtless  "secondary  sources,"  as 
drawn  from  the  fountain  of  truth.  "Fragments  of  old 
thought  that  have  been  long  in  the  world,  like  boulders 
left  by  the  primeval  streams  of  man's  intellect,"  Pro 
fessor  Woodberry  picturesquely  if  rather  hardly  calls 
them.  Even  the  theory  of  Nature,  perhaps  his  most 
personal  philosophic  contribution  is,  he  continues, 
"not  without  copious  illustrations  in  mystical  writers." 
But  however  strictly  he  had  inherited  them,  Emer 
son  had  undoubtedly,  in  Goethe's  famous  phrase, 
"reconquered"  them  for  himself.  And  out  of  them 

153 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

he  had  composed  what  for  him  was  an  eminently 
practical  working  hypothesis  which  it  pleased  him  to 
regard  as  the  constitution  of  the  universe.-  Is  there 
as  a  matter  of  fact  any  "  over  soul "  ?  one  may  ask. 
As  a  matter  of  fact  there  was  for  Emerson.  But  I 
imagine  that  he  did  not  reach  it  by  the  revelation  of 
intuition  but  by  the  convenient  road  of  inferential  if 
not  rigorous  logic,  proceeding  from  postulates  particu 
larly  agreeable  to  his  own  very  peremptory  predilec 
tions.  Indeed  it  is  when  he  abandons  his  intuitions 
— or  attempts  to  give  the  order  of  sequence  to  their 
succession — that  his  genius,  which  is  ineradically  frag 
mentary  abandons  him.  An  unoriginal  philosophy 
of  shreds  and  patches  may  be  welded  into  effective 
coherence  by  systematic  logic  alone.  And  Emerson's 
so  far  from  being  rigorous  was  thoroughly  fanciful. 
All  his  metaphysic  is  fanciful.  When  he  differen 
tiates  his  philosophy  and  diversifies  its  structure 
into  a  semblance  of  metaphysical  system,  it  becomes, 
I  think,  as  nearly  insipid  as  the  functioning  of  a 
really  great  mind  can  be.  His  love  of  mystery,  the 
poetic  element  in  his  thinking,  is  manifested  in  mys 
tification,  and  his  "circles"  and  "polarity"  and  "com 
pensation"  and  differentiated  "oneness"  and  "over 
soul"  and  so  on  wear  less  the  aspect  of  august  Laws 
than  of  the  elementary  varied  by  the  trivial — having 
their  genesis,  too,  in  a  demand  as  superfluous  as  the 
supply  is  essentially  supposititious.  Certainly  they  add 
less  than  nothing  to  the  literary  value  of  his  writings, 
which — since  the  philosophers  will  have  none  of  him — 

154 


EMERSON 

is  after  all  the  important  matter.    They  make  even  les« 
ponderable  what  is  already  on  the  verge  of  volatility. 

Nevertheless  if  much  of  its  fioritura,  as  his  more  per 
sonal  contributions  to  it  may  be  called,  was,  thus,  more 
or  less  obscurely  deduced — since  man  is  after  all  a 
reasoning  animal,  as  well  as  inspired  by  " Reason"  in 
the  Hegelian  sense — his  philosophy  was  in  substance 
and  practically  altogether  intuitional;  and,  as  such,  as 
sound  as  traditional  authority  could  make  it.  That  is 
to  say,  it  was  good  for  the  general  use  as  well  for  his 
own.  Any  kind  of  "ontology"  will  serve  so  long  as  its 
associated  philosophy  is  sound,  and  however  an  in 
tuitional  philosophy  may  be  depreciated,  it  has  this 
in  its  favor  that  the  mind  itself  recognizes  its  central 
postulate  as  its  own  habitual  process.  It  has  con 
sciousness — "the  light  of  all  our  seeing" — on  its  side. 
Whatever  the  ultimate  origin  of  ideas,  in  other  words, 
introspection  empirically  attests  them  as  at  any  rate  not 
immediately  proceeding  from  experience.  Otherwise  the 
world,  given  over  to  introspection  for  so  many  ages, 
would  have  anticipated  Locke  even  before  Bacon. 
Ideas  "swim  into  our  ken"  and  it  is  quite  impossible 
for  consciousness  to  derive  them  from  what  has  evoked 
them.  The  nexus  escapes  it.  We  conceive  as  unex 
pectedly  as  we  perceive.  That  is  to  say,  even  if  Newton 
really  inferred  gravitation  from  the  fall  of  the  apple — • 
as  so  many  had  failed  to  do ! — what  filled  his  conscious 
ness  at  the  instant  was  not  inference  but  cognition.  It 
is  this  that  makes  Emerson's  philosophy  so  generally 
attractive — its  harmonious  accord  with  the  report  of  the 

155 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

general  consciousness  of  even  the  unreflective  and  the 
inexpert.  It  preaches  what  common  experience  ap 
proves.  On  the  other  hand  of  course  the  way  in  which 
ideas  reach  the  mind  or  are  revealed  within  it  having 
nothing  whatever  to  do  with  their  validity,  Emerson's 
implicit  trust  in  them  —  unexampled,  in  the  immense  and 
varied  use  he  made  of  it,  since  Aristotle's  discovery  of 
their  need  of  testing  —  has  in  him  its  naive,  and  in  his 
disciples  its  incontestably  fatuous,  side.  But  if  he  mis 
took  guesses  at,  for  glimpses  of,  truth  on  occasion,  it 
cannot  be  denied  that,  given  his  intense  love  of  it  —  in 
itself  the  most  powerful  clarifier  of  mental  vision  — 
and  his  altogether  remarkable  good  sense  —  inherited 
perhaps  from  generations  of  intellectual  ancestors  who 
knew  not  whim  —  his  own  extraordinarily  gifted  intel 
ligence  worked  with  a  minimum  of  insecurity,  as  it 
undoubtedly  worked  in  its  freest,  its  happiest  and 
its  most  congenial  possible  way,  within  the  elastic  frame- 
A  work  of  an  intuitional  philosophy,  and  would  have 
keen  strangled  by  an  empirical  one.  His  philosophy 
any  ra*e'  as  ^  sa^J  sinted  him.  It  fostered  the  ex- 
Pansi°n  °f  m's  native  genius  and  fructified  as  any 
thing  other  would  have  sterilized,  the  luxuriant  efflores 
cence  of  his  meditation.  Without  it,  without  the  cer 
tainty  his  direct  vision  enabled  him  to  feel,  his  wisdom 
would  have  far  less  authority  and  would  have  suffered 
from  the  inevitable  enfeeblement  of  speculation.  In 
duction  is  impertinent  to  the  seer.  "Without  the 
vision"  he  loses  his  office  quite  as  inevitably  as  "the 
people  perish." 

156 


V  K\ 
t'^ 


EMERSON 

His  philosophy  also  suited  the  time  and  environment 
of  which  he  was  in  turn  a  product  as  well  as  a  prophet. 
Elusive  as  he  is,  Emerson  was  of  the  essence  of  New 
England,  and  the  New  England  of  the  early  nineteenth 
century.  Generations  of  militant  Protestantism  neces 
sarily  intensified  the  essence  of  non-conformity  without, 
of  course,  necessarily  transmitting  its  traditional  ex 
pression.  It  is  of  course  the  type  that  persists,  and  the 
type  is  not  a  set  of  opinions,  however  rigid,  but  the 
attitude  of  mind  in  which  they  are  held.  Emerson's 
catholicity  extends  to  indifference  rather  than  to  toler 
ance,  and  in  itself  is  distinctly  intellectual  rather  than 
sympathetic  or  voluntary.  He  is  constitutionally  less 
a  descendant  of  Erasmus  than  of  Luther.  His  protest 
against  titular  Protestantism,  against  dogma  in  gen 
eral,  is  identical  in  nature  with  the  Reformers'  pro 
test  against  specific  dogmas.  Its  expression  is  in  scope 
chiefly  an  evolution,  though  in  temper  a  miraculous 
variation  from  type.  It  allows  him,  to  be  sure,  an  oc 
casional  return  to  the  Puritan  luxury  of  oppugnation 
and  excess,  as  in  his  remark  that  John  Brown  had 
made  the  gallows  as  glorious  as  the  Cross,  or  in  an 
ironical  reference  to  history  or  culture  or  "Europe," 
or  tart  censure  of  the  "Oriental"  way  in  which  "the 
good  Jesus"  has  been  deified — instead  perhaps  of  being 
"ground  into  paint"  for  more  specific  use,  as  he  says 
was  the  fate  to  which  Plato  subjected  his  relations. 
But  in  general  it  is  needless  to  say  he  has  retained  the 
mental  attitude  of  Puritanism  purged  of  its  polemic  and 
contentious  temper.  And  this  attitude  is  illustrated 

157 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

in  the  two  chief  objects  of  his  consecration — indi 
vidualism  and  the  ideal.  Nowhere  else  could  the 
preacher  of  this  conjoint  gospel — into  which  all  Emer 
son  may  be  run  up — have  been  developed  in  Emersonian 
perfection  outside  the  New  England  of  his  day.  in 
dividualism  is  confined  to  Anglo-Saxon  Protestantism, 
and  in  English  nonconformity  the  ideal  is  of  neces 
sity  obscured  by  the  practical  difficulty  of  sustaining 
life  and  flowering  amid  obstacles  instead  of  fostering 
favor. 

On  the  other  hand  exactly  what  the  soil  that  had 
produced  this  gospel  needed  was  the  enrichment  of 
renewal.  In  a  new  embodiment  Emerson  furnished 
this.  Modified  and  adapted  to  new  conditions  and  new 
occasions — subsequent  phases  inevitably,  with  time, 
become  as  static  as  those  they  themselves  supplanted — 
above  all,  tinged  with  poetry,  vital  with  eloquence  and 
softened  into  suavity,  the  old  Protestant  gospel  of  the 
individual  and  the  ideal  responded  accurately  to  the 
actual  need  of  his  country  in  his  time.  The  period  of 
colonial  growth  had  been  succeeded  by  that  of  national 
condensation  and  aggrandizement,  and  in  the  pressing 
interest  of  its  quite  indispensable  aims  its  society  had 
come  to  tyrannize  the  individual,  and  material  progress 
to  obscure  the  ideal  life.  Undoubtedly  too  much  has 
been  said  of  the  alleged  pusillanimity  of  this  period  of 
our  history,  and  cruel  injustice  has  been  done  to  the 
patriots  who  but  for  the  fanatics  might  have  held  the 
nation  together  by  the  cement  of  compromise  instead  of 
that  of  blood.  Professor  Burgess  has  made  it  difficult 

158 


EMERSON 


longer  to  refuse  them  their  meed  of  just  praise.  At  the 
same  time  the  general  peril  naturally  produced  the 
situation  which  Emerson  quite  truly  as  well  as  solemnly 
characterized  in  one  of  his  earliest  utterances,  declaring, 
''This  country  has  not  fulfilled  what  seemed  the  reason 
able  expectation  of  mankind."  If  it  has  in  greater  de 
gree  done  so  since  it  is  largely  due  to  the  self-reliance 
and  the  ideality  with  which  his  dauntless  clairvoyance 
inspired  it,  and  made  to  appear  rational  as  well  as  at 
tractive.  It  has  at  least  presented  his  career  to  man 
kind  and  mankind  in  profiting  by  it  can  hardly  fail  to 
acknowledge  that  in  one  respect  at  least  his  country 
has  more  than  fulfilled  its  reasonable  expectation. 

Specifically  one  of  his  greatest  services  both  to  us  and 
to  mankind — chary  as  he  was  of  specific  service : 

"He  that  feeds  men  serveth  few; 
He  serves  all  who  dares  be  true," 

and  subtly  as  this  one  is  rendered,  being  in  fact  rather 
an  implication  of  his  writings  than  anywhere  explicit 
in  them — is  w^at_jmay,_be^called  the  rationalization  of 
democracy  through  the  ideal  development  of  the  indi 
vidual.  His  defective  sympathies  qualify  his  own 
democracy  which  thus  rests  wholly  on  an  intellectual 
basis,  and  for  this  reason  his  service  to  it  will  perhaps 
some  day  be  perceived  as  one  of  the  greatest  that  have 
been  rendered  to  this  greatest  of  modern  causes.  Too 
modest  to  conceive  his  mission  as  otherwise  benevolent 
than  is  involved  in  the  conversion  of  life  into  truth, 
too  fastidious  to  respond  to  the  elementary  appeal  of 

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AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

philanthropy,  he  was  yet  bold  enough  and  detached 
enough  to  recognize  the  injustice  of  privilege,  and  the 
claims  of  every  human  potentiality  for  development  into 
power.  Besides,  his  philosophy  of  the  identity  of  mind 
and  his  gospel  of  individualism  imposed  democracy 
upon  him.  The  very  fact  that  he  was  no  respecter  of 
persons  protected  him  from  illusions  as  to  classes,  and 
the  finality  of  feudalism  was  alone  enough  to  lead  his 
revolutionary  and  independent  spirit  to  see  it  as  an  ar 
rest  of  development  and  not  an  ideal.  Association  with 
God  and  his  own  higher  self  naturally  induced  contempt 
of  artificial  human  distinctions,  and  a  theologian  who 
did  not  divide  mankind  even  into  sheep  and  goats 
had  no  disposition  to  fix  them  in  categories  of  com 
plicated  interdependence,  where  to  preach  to  them  his 
favorite  doctrine  of  self-reliance  would  be  derision.  If 
his  emotional  nature  lacked  warmth,  what  eminently  it 
possessed  was  an  exquisite  refinement,  and  a  constituent 
of  his  refinement  was  an  instinctive  antipathy  to  ideas  of 
dominance,  dictation,  patronage,  caste  and  material  su 
periority  whose  essential  grossness  repelled  him  and  whose 
ultimate  origin  in  contemptuousness — probably  the  one 
moral  state  except  cravenness  that  chiefly  he  deemed 
contemptible — was  plain  enough  to  his  penetration. 

He  hated  the  mob,  and  shrank  from  the  vulgar.  No 
doubt  Tiberius  Gracchus  did.  "Enormous  popula 
tions,"  he  exclaims,  "if  they  be  beggars,  are  disgusting, 
like  moving  cheese,  like  hills  of  ants,  or  of  fleas — the 
more,  the  worse."  He  certainly  could  not  echo  St. 
Francis's:  "My  brother,  the  ass."  But  if  his  democ- 

160 


EMERSON 

racy  was  not  founded  on  sentiment,  it  was  perhaps  all 
the  more  firmly  established  in  principle  by  penetrating 
vision,  and,  as  I  have  intimated,  perhaps  it  is  only  in  this 
way  that  democracy  will  be  able  to  complete  its  conquest 
of  the  human  spirit,  that  is  to  say  by  convincing  the 
mind;  the  heart  of  mankind  has  often  been  persuaded 
even  to  ecstasy,  but  pure  sentiment  is  subject  to  striking, 
not  to  say,  tragic,  reaction.  From  the  democratic  point 
of  view,  I  know  of  no  finer  spectacle  than  that  furnished 
by  the  procession  of  Emerson's  lecturing  years.  All 
over  the  North  and  West  of  the  country,  as  well  as  in  his 
own  New  England,  "the  people" — there  were  no  others 
— gathered  in  cities  and  villages  and  in  substantial 
numbers  to  listen  to  the  suave  delivery  of  his  serene 
message,  to  enjoy  each  one  after  his  capacity,  the  hon 
eyed  extract  of  his  assimilated  culture,  the  fruit  of  his 
claustral  meditation,  on  various  phases  of  all  sorts  of 
topics,  but  always  the  Ideal.  However  much  or  little 
they  comprehended,  they  at  least  savored  it,  and 
their  eagerness  to  breathe  its  rarefied  air  and  ex 
perience  its  elusive  stimulus,  witnesses  a  correspond 
ing  idealism  in  his  public.  His  public  was  no  doubt 
as  eminently  naive  as  he  was  subtle,  but  they  met  on 
the  common  ground  of  the  dignity  of  the  individual 
and  his  indefinitely  great  capacity  for  development 
through  divine  illumination.  Truly  a  different  social 
phenomenon  altogether  from  that  of  the  University 
Extension  movement,  say,  whether  or  no  as  valuable 
measured  by  its  fruits. 

Measured  by  its  fruits,  Emersonian  doctrine  must 
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AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

certainly  be,  and  it  cannot  be  contested  that  some  of 
these  have  not  been  fair.  There  can  be  no  doubt  of  the 
preponderance  of  beneficence  in  his  influence,  and 
rightly  apprehended  it  can  have  no  other  quality.  His 
every  understanding  reader  must  receive  from  him  a 
spiritual  quickening  that  combines  moral  earnestness 
with  intellectual  exhilaration,  a  purified  sense  of  the 
pricelessness  at  once  and  the  attainability  of  the  very 
best,  and  a  corresponding  disregard  for  the  second-rate. 
He  shrivels  mediocrity  for  us  as  no  other  writer  does. 
His  exaction  is  almost  exorbitant,  but  the  courage  and 
the  consciousness  of  capacity  he  stimulates  echo  "the 
youth"  who  in  his  own  famous  line — unparalleled  in 
literature,  I  think,  for  its  tonic  effect — " replies,  'I 
can.'"  But  he  has  not  always  been  rightly  appre 
hended,  and  where  he  has  not — where,  against  his  re 
peated  protest,  he  has  been  accepted  literally  and 
formally  as  a  guide  rather  than  as  a  stimulus — his  ex 
treme  non-conformity  has  been  disintegrating.  The 
disposition  to  execute  ideas  instead  of  keeping  them  in 
reserve  for  general  purposes  of  illumination  and  edifica 
tion — a  disposition  which,  it  need  not  be  said,  Emerson 
himself,  who  held  them  in  solution  as  it  were,  did  not 
share — has  resulted  in  many  quarters  in  a  flagrant 
individualism  that  is  but  a  caricature  of  that  which 
Emerson  preached.  All  the  same  it  is  to  be  charged  to 
his  account,  I  think.  Doubtless  he  never  realized  that 
a  philosophy  born  of  protest  could  become  so  positive, 
and  indeed  in  its  way  ultramontane,  as  to  have  its  own 
rigidities  and  restrictions.  We  may  almost  say  that 

162 


EMERSON 

what  now  passes  strictly  for  Emersonianism  is  the 
antithesis  of  the  flux  in  which  he  joyed  to  see  the  uni 
verse  whirl.  Emptied  of  imagination,  Emerson's  phi 
losophy  is  infallibly  transformed.  Almost  all  the 
"perky"  people  one  knows  are  Emersonians,  and  in 
cruel  truth,  a  numerous  progeny  of  pedants  may  claim 
descent — at  least  by, the  sinister  hand — from  a  parent 
to  whom  above  all  things  pedantry  was  an  offence. 
Just  at  present  multitudes  of  those  who  are  caught  up  in 
the  contemporary  current  that  is  drifting  away  from 
materialism — and  in  whom  the  discovery  of  spiritual 
forces  produces  the  same  enthusiasm  it  doubtless  did 
in  the  primitive  man — feed  or  at  least  browse  upon  a 
literature  that  curiously  caricatures  Emerson.  Every 
one  would  agree  that  the  crying,  the  notorious  defect 
of  these  zealots  is  lack  of  culture.  Culture  and 
nothing  but  culture  is  precisely  the  cure  for  the  men 
tal  condition  illustrated  in  these  and  other  eccentric 
ities  of  the  spirit  of  nonconformity.  And  when  one 
sees  the  excess  to  which  Emerson's  central  doctrine  of 
self-reliance  is  capable  of  being  carried,  even  more  im 
portant  than  that  one  should  "be  content  with  one's 
own  light"  seems  the  result  desired  by  Mrs.  Shelley — 
who  had  had  an  experience  quite  otherwise  illuminating 
than  was  attainable  at  Concord! — for  her  son:  "Teach 
him  to  think  for  himself?  Oh,  my  God,  teach  him 
rather  to  think  like  other  people!"  When  Emerson 
affirms  "  Whoso  would  be  a  man  must  be  a  nonconform 
ist,"  it  is  permitted  to  wish,  thinking  of  some  of  his  dis 
ciples,  that  he  had  spent  at  least  one  day  in  explanation. 

163 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

V 

Culture,  however,  did  not  enter  into  Emerson's  phi 
losophy.  His  philosophy,  indeed,  following  his  instinct 
does  not  so  much  neglect  as  positively  impeach 
it.  There  is  no  denying  the  fact,  which  is  vaunted 
rather  than  dissembled.  He  has  a  hard  word  for  it 
always.  Culture  means  on  the  one  hand  discipline, 
which  irked  him,  and  on  the  other  acquisition,  which 
to  him  could  only  have  a  disciplinary  function.  In 
either  aspect  it  involves  effort  and  effort  lay  quite  out 
side  his  ideal  of  surrender  to  intuition  and  impulse.  "I 
would  not  degrade  myself,"  he  says,  "by  casting  about 
for  a  thought  nor  by  waiting  for  one."  And  it  is  far 
less  a  transient  than  a  prevailing  mood  in  which  he 
affirms,  "I  would  write  on  the  lintels  of  the  door-post, 
Whim."  And  this  spirit  informs  not  only  his  intellec 
tual  but  his  morv1!  philosophy,  so  far  as  these  are  separ 
able.  What  he  h~>lds  in  reserve  in  the  one  case  is  the 
"explanation"  in  vhich  he  "cannot  spend  the  day," 
and  in  the  other  the  postulate  that  impulse  should  of 
course  be  pure  and  good.  His  own  being  angelic,  he 
assumes  integrity  in  that  of  the  world  in  general.  "Our 
moral  nature,"  he  insists,  "is  vitiated  by  any  inter 
ference  of  our  will."  The  curbing,  directing,  develop 
ing  of  instinct  and  impulse  by  the  effort  involved  in  dis 
ciplinary  culture  is  to  him  as  superfluous  as  it  is  held 
by  the  Perfectionist  and  the  Antinomian.  He  would 
either  have  controverted  Froude's  comparison  of  the 
moral  life  of  man  to  the  flight  of  a  bird  in  the  air 

164 


EMERSON 

which  sustains  itself  only  by  effort,  or  have  contended 
that  the  exertion  on  whose  cessation  man  falls  should 
be  as  instinctive  and  unconscious  as  the  sky-lark's  up 
ward  winging. 

But  even  for  culture  that  involves  a  minimum  of 
effort,  he  feels  no  particular  friendliness.  Although  it 
is  at  the  least  the  other  side  of  the  shield  of  self-reliance, 
it  is  one  of  the  few  that  he  rarely  turns  around.  "  Obey 
thyself/'  "Trust  thyself,"  are  adjurations  he  never 
qualifies.  Bishop  Wilson's  caution,  after  saying  "Act 
in  accordance  with  the  best  light  that  you  have," 
namely,  "be  sure  that  your  light  is  not  darkness,"  is 
one  he  never  adds.  He  establishes  egoism  on  a  basis 
of  practicable  infallibility.  Everything  external,  in 
fact,  is  valued  so  strictly  for  what  it  educes  and  evokes 
as  to  minimize  its  importance  as  augmentation  and  even 
illumination.  Education  is  of  course  essentially  as 
well  as  etymologically  thus  to  be  conceived.  But  even 
thus  conceived  culture  is  its  complement,  and  the  edu 
cation  of  others  may  advantageously  correct,  modify 
and  enrich,  as  well  as  stimulate  the  mind — increase  its 
store  as  well  as  strengthen  its  powers.  Knowledge  is 
power  as  well  as  a  source  of  it.  It  is  only  emphasis 
doubtless  that  saves  the  distinction  from  barrenness, 
but  in  such  a  matter  emphasis  is  everything. 

Emerson's  whole  stress  and  accent  belittle  culture  in 
both  its  aspects,  but  especially  in  its  aspect  as  acquisi 
tion.  The  essay  on  "History"  is  certainly  not  designed 
merely  to  state  the  trite  truth  that  education  is  educa 
tive,  but  to  deny  that  it  is  anything  else.  Yet  in  main- 

165 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

taining  so  rigidly  that  the  educative  is  the  sole  function 
of  history,  he  is  really  belittling  this  function  itself. 
It  is  eminently  not  the  kind  of  education  he  can  con 
sistently  prize,  since,  even  considered  in  the  least 
material,  and  therefore  to  him  most  congenial,  way  as 
"  philosophy  teaching  by  examples,"  his  philosophy 
eschews  "examples"  as  the  fleeting  phenomena  they 
no  doubt  are  compared  with  Nature's  "eterne,"  though 
surely  less  coherent  and  articulate,  undertakings. 
How  he  really  feels  is  shown  in  such  a  passage  as  the 
following  in  which  if  it  be  pedantic  to  note  flippancy 
one  may  surely  remark  the  absence  of  the  historic  sense : 

The  professor  interrogates  Sylvina  in  the  history  class  about 
Odoacer  and  Alaric.  Sylvina  can't  remember,  but  suggests  that 
Odoacer  was  defeated;  and  the  professor  tartly  replies:  "No, 
he  defeated  the  Romans."  But  'tis  plain  to  the  visitor,  that  'tis 
of  no  importance  at  all  about  Odoacer,  and  it  is  a  great  deal  of 
importance  about  Sylvina;  and  if  she  says  he  was  defeated,  why 
he  had  better  a  great  deal  have  been  defeated  than  give  her  a 
moment's  annoy.  Odoacer,  if  there  was  a  particle  of  the  gentle 
man  in  him,  would  have  said,  "  Let  me  be  defeated  a  thousand 
times." 

It  is  perhaps  fortunate  for  the  visitor  that  it  is  of  no  im 
portance  to  him  about  Odoacer.  The  history  seems  a 
little  mixed.  And  though  in  general  so  far  as  any  equip 
ment  he  may  need  is  concerned  Emerson  illustrates  cult 
ure  nearly  as  much  as — bien  a  son  aise! — he  depreciates 
it,  it  is  no  doubt  in  his  lack  of  the  historic  sense  that  he 
illustrates  it  least.  " Representative  Men"  is  critically 
penetrating,  but  the  treatment  is  characteristically  sum 
mary  because  it  stops  with  what  is  to  the  critic  himself 

166 


EMERSON 

generally  provocative  and  suggestive;  especially  char 
acteristic  is  the  title  of  the  introduction :  "  Uses  of 
Great  Men."  One  follows  easily  the  trend  of  his  pre 
dilection  :  Art  in  his  view,  for  instance,  is  chiefly  valuable 
as  recording  history;  history  is  of  value  so  strictly  as 
fuel  for  his  own  intellectual  combustion  that  it  is  of 
small  importance  in  even  this  regard;  his  mind  in  its 
creative  and  not  its  acquisitive  aspect  is  his  central 
concern ;  and  in  this  aspect  is  tinder  to  which  any  spark 
suffices.  No  doubt  occasionally — and  impulsively — he 
forgot  that  many  of  his  "own  spirits  in  prison"  were 
less  happily  constituted. 

His  neglect  of  the  furniture  of  the  mind,  the  material 
it  has  to  work  with — hardly  less  important  than  the  con 
dition  of  its  muscles,  so  to  speak — ,  his  peremptory 
rejection  of  all  that  is  not  plainly  addressed  grist  for 
the  individual's  own  mill,  appears  elsewhere  as  plainly 
as  in  his  view  of  history.  It  appears  in  his  literary 
prejudices,  certainly  the  most  whimsical  that  could  be 
predicated  of  a  really  great  mind,  whatever  its  tempera 
mental  defects.  "He  could  see  nothing,"  Mr.  Cabot 
records,  "in  Shelley,  Aristophanes,  Don  Quixote,  Dick 
ens."  Dante  whom  he  conventionally  celebrates  in 
verse,  he  called  obscurely  "another  Zerah  Colburn"— 
described  in  the  dictionaries  as  a  youthful  mathematical 
prodigy  of  the  day.  He  finds  that  Landor,  Coleridge, 
Carlyle,  Wordsworth  all  lack  the  intuition  of  religious 
truth,  adding:  "They  have  no  idea  of  that  species  of 
moral  truth  [identifying  'religious'  with  'moral/  one 
perceives  incidentally]  that  I  call  the  first  philosophy." 

167 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

His  race  prejudices  are  also  plain,  as  appears  especially 
in  "English  Traits"— a  work  distrusted  by  the  English 
themselves  almost  as  much  as  "Our  Old  Home"  is 
disesteemed,  and  though  surprisingly  full  of  instructive 
data  as  well  as  distinctly  entertaining,  distinctly  less 
penetrating  and  sound  than  it  might  have  been  had 
he  had  even  a  touch  of  cosmopolitanism  wherewith  to 
modify  its  rather  loose  panegyric.  He  knew  German 
and  Germany  of  course.  His  philosophy  issued  thence 
on  its  way  from  Plato,  though  he  caught  a  good  deal  of 
it  in  rebound  from  Coleridge;  his  positive  preference 
for  translations  is  well  known.  But  one  may  almost 
say  that  he  appears  never  to  have  heard  of  France, 
except  as  an  appanage  of  Napoleon,  of  whom  he  had 
a  curious  and  curiously  enlightened  appreciation.  So 
cial  questions  also  left  him  cold.  "I  have  no  social 
talent,"  he  says  of  himself  and  might  with  equal  truth 
have  added,  no  social  interests.  Culture  prescribes  an 
interest  in  the  present  and  future  of  mankind  as  well 
as  in  its  past.  But  mankind,  as  such,  interested  him 
very  superficially.  Unlike  his  ally  Nature  he  is  careless 
of  the  type  and  though  it  is  his  individuality  that  chiefly 
he  cares  for  in  the  individual  he  certainly  emphasizes 
this  in  a  way  that  minimizes  all  the  relations  of  fellow 
ship.  His  social  sense,  in  a  word,  has  always  been 
found  by  his  critics  even  more  defective  than  his  historic, 
and  attests  even  more  plainly  to  the  present  time  his 
deficiency  in  culture,  which  alone  could  have  modified 
his  instinctive  individualism  and  to  which  in  an  essen 
tial  respect  therefore  his  philosophy  appears  provincial 

168 


EMERSON 

and,  however  vital,  barbaric.  Individualism  is  currently, 
it  need  not  be  said,  a  waning  force  in  all  "practical" 
philosophy,  in  whose  domain  on  the  contrary  the  social 
sense  has  strongly  entrenched  itself. 

It  has  done  so  in  no  small  degree  in  virtue  of  its  sub 
stantial  accord  with  what  culture  recognizes  as  the  sur 
vival  in  society  of  the  spirit  of  fraternity,  which  Chris 
tianity  inherited  perhaps  from  Stoicism  and,  enriched 
with  its  own  emotional  opulence  and  elevation,  trans 
mitted  to  the  modern  world — one  of  its  latest  embodi 
ments  being  in  fact  expressly  labelled  "  Christian  social 
ism/'  And  Emerson,  to  go  one  step  further,  whether  or 
no  his  devotion  to  the  "moral  sentiment"  be  exactly 
characterized  as  religious  or  as  merely  ethical,  is  as  dis 
tinctly  un-Christian  as  he  is  unsocial.  The  orthodox 
of  his  day  followed  a  sure  instinct  in  distrusting  him, 
however  pusillanimous  the  form  the  feeling  took  on 
occasion.  The  orthodox  distrust  of  him  has  largely 
passed  away,  partly  through  its  own  transformation, 
partly  through  the  extreme  winningness  of  his  eloquence 
and  his  personal  saintliness,  partly  through  its  failure 
to  perceive  that  his  variety  of  idealism  is  as  hostile 
to  the  essence  as  to  the  ecclesiasticism  of  Christianity. 
From  the  point  of  view  of  culture  Christianity,  denuded 
of  its  ecclesiastical  sanctions,  is  still  more  to  be  explained 
as  a  force,  a  factor  in  evolution,  an  element  of  progress. 
It  is  impossible  not  to  reckon  with  its  principles,  its 
discoveries,  its  modifications  and  deflections  of  the 
Pagan  current  of  tendency  and  constitution  of  moral 
attitude.  Goethe,  for  example,  passes  with  the  ortho- 

169 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

dox  for  a  Pagan  in  virtue  of  his  culture.  But  culture 
includes  the  orthodox  and  Goethe's  web  of  life  lost  no 
single  thread  furnished  by  Christianity.  The  profound 
contribution  to  the  philosophy  of  existence  made  in  the 
utterance  "He  that  loveth  his  life  shall  lose  it"  finds  its 
echo  across  the  dissonances  of  twenty  ages  in 

"  Entbehren  sollst  du!  sollst  entbehren!  " 

— the  keynote  of  the  greatest  modern  poem. 

Goethe,  however,  was  in  the  full  current  of  the  stream 
of  culture — not  as  Emerson,  a  complacent  spectator 
on  its  banks,  intelligently  interested  in  the  chips  that 
floated  by  on  its  surface,  but  really  preoccupied  with 
truth.  He  had  never  been  extruded  from  conformity 
by  a  doubt  as  to  whether  he  had  a  right  to  administer 
the  Lord's  Supper  to  a  Unitarian  congregation.  Self- 
assertion  even  of  the  serenest  sort  never  occurred  to 
him.  He  was  engaged  in  doing  things — that  is,  writing 
things — that  had  relations  to  their  before  and  after 
congeners,  not  in  contemplating  the  importance  of  his 
individuality.  Hence  he  felt  the  force  and  pressure  of 
the  things  that  had  been  done — and  written — before 
him,  and  applied  himself  to  building  another  chamber 
in  the  nautilus-shell  of  culture — that  culture  to  which 
Emerson  penetratingly  accuses  him  of  sacrificing  truth. 
What  has  Emerson  added  to  that?  The  answer  is 
capital  in  any  consideration  of  him,  though  it  in  no  wise 
obscures  his  undoubted  invigoration  of  the  sinews  of  the 
soul.  The  two  achievements  are,  however,  far  from 
identical  and  it  cannot  be  too  clearly  perceived  that 

170 


EMERSON 

Emerson  and  culture  are  at  war.  That  is  to  say,  he  is 
at  war  with  the  greatest  force  in  the  modern  world — he 
who  passes  in  general  for  the  most  modern  of  men.  He 
is  modern,  however,  in  virtue  of  his  wonderful  catholicity 
of  appreciation,  not  because  of  his  temperamental  sym 
pathy  with  the  way  the  world  is  going.  It  is  going  in 
quite  the  contrary  direction  from  that  which  he  indi 
cated  to  it;  the  individual  is  withering  and  the  world 
is  becoming  more  and  more,  in  virtue  at  least  of 
a  growing  sense  that  whatever  is  individual  is  neces 
sarily  partial  and  lacks  the  authority  of  synthetic 
co-operation. 

The  gospel  of  self-assertion,  therefore,  which  is  but 
another  name  for  Emerson's  stirring  "self-reliance,"  has 
less  virtue  to-day  than  in  a  period  of  traditional  tyranny 
especially  blind  to  the  ideal.  Its  virtue  is  incontestable, 
but  it  is  already  practically  relegated  to  the  category  of 
"subsumed"  and  presupposed  principia  of  all  thought 
and  conduct.  His  optimism,  accordingly,  remains  tonic, 
but  it  is  no  longer  daily  food.  It  is  marked  rather  by 
elevation  than  depth;  and  his  philosophy,  taken  as  a 
whole,  which  it  pervades  and  indeed  unifies,  is  thus 
marked.  In  its  concentration  on  the  ideal  and  its  cor 
responding  neglect  of  the  actual,  it  is  not  philosophically 
central  and  complete.  It  stimulates  aspiration,  but 
does  not  sustain  realization.  It  would  be  shallow  to 
describe  it  as  superficial.  Nothing  in  Emerson  is  super 
ficial.  And  to  the  sense  that  marks  his  lack  of  depth, 
his  elevation  is  quite  as  clear  if  not  wholly  compensatory. 
Moreover,  his  lack  of  depth  is  always  felt  as  a  tempera- 

171 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

mental  coldness,  never,  it  need  hardly  be  said,  as  intel 
lectual  aridity.  There  is  nothing  of  which  he  fails  to 
take  account,  but  his  accent  and  stress — an  immense 
matfer — are  not  dictated  by  feeling,  and  consequently 
have  the  less  weight.  The  ascription  of  optimism  to  him 
in  the  Pangloss  sense  would  be  absurd.  A  view  of  the 
actual  as  the  best  possible  world  can  hardly  be  ascribed 
to  a  revolutionary  and  reformatory  spirit,  always  and 
systematically  a  critic  of  the  established  order — a 
writer  whose  work  is  full  of  allusions  to  the  inepti 
tudes  of  human  imbecility  (not  an  infrequent  word 
with  him)  and  who  asserts  that  "a  person  seldom  falls 
sick  but  the  bystanders  are  animated  with  a  faint  hope 
that  he  will  die."  "We  live,"  he  maintains,  "in  a  very 
low  state  of  the  world,"  and,  in  his  excessive  way,  as 
severates,  "  The  highest  virtue  is  always  against  the  law." 
In  fact  his  whole  work  originated  and  continued  in  a  pro 
test  against  institutional  circumstance,  as  he  experienced 
it  in  his  own  environment  and  perceived  it  in  the  world 
at  large,  historic  and  actual.  His  optimism  consists 
in  his  confidence  in  the  natural  constitution  of  things, 
in  the  exhilaration  its  contemplation  gives  him,  in 
his  persuasion  that  Nature  is  the  best  possible  Nature, 
and  that  man  though  "fallen,"  has  infinite  potentiali 
ties,  his  perfectibility  being  dependent  only  on  the 
transformation  of  "masses"  into  individuals,  on  ignor 
ing  the  cultivation  of  his  garden  and,  not  to  put  too  fine 
a  point  upon  it,  brushing  up  his  wits.  With  intellectual 
illumination  thus  obtained  his  salvation  is  secure. 
Moreover,  he  understands  man  as  "fallen"  in  the  sense 

172 


EMERSON 

of  fallen  from  his  native  estate  more  in  the  Rousseau 
and  not  at  all  in  the  theological  sense,  except  of  course 
that  Rousseau's  view  is,  so  to  speak,  historical  and 
Emerson's  naturally  purely  ideal.  Had  Pangloss  heard 
of  this  variety  of  optimism,  far  more  subtile  but  also  far 
less  vulnerable  than  his  own,  it  is  not  unlikely  that  he 
would  have  consented  to  adopt  it  as  a  wholly  acceptable 
compromise;  in  which  event  literature  would  have  lost 
"Candide."  There  is  no  way  of  impeaching  the  view 
that  there  exists  an  order  of  Nature — "an  absolute  order 
of  things  as  they  stand  in  the  mind  of  God" — which 
"the  intellect  searches  out  without  the  colors  of  affec 
tion,"  and  which  is  a  harmony  coestablished  with  the 
perverse  order  known  to  experience,  quite  as  absolutely 
real  though  wholly  ideal,  and  needing  only  to  be  per 
ceived  by  the  mind  whose  vision  penetrates  the  veils  of 
material  phenomena.  Just  as  to  Kant  the  moral  law 
was  as  real  as  the  starry  heavens.  Only,  to  hold  this 
view  with  enthusiasm  is  to  be  an  optimist,  and  an 
optimist  far  otherwise  convinced  and  inveterate  than 
either  the  genial  or  the  cynical  type  of  indifferentist. 
Besides,  ex  m  termini  the  revolutionist  is  an  optimist. 
It  is  the  conservative — temperamental  or  purely  philo 
sophic — who  is  the  pessimist,  as  being  less  content  than 
timorous. 

Fear,  however,  is  as  fundamental  as  courage  in  the 
constitution  of  the  universe.  It  is  at  least  the  salutary 
complement  of  courage  of  the  adventurous  order,  which 
is  rather  the  instrument  of  crises.  It  is  the  fear  of  the 
Lord  that  is  the  beginning  of  wisdom.  It  is  fear  that 

173 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

conserves  and  guides  and  shields  from  peril  and  destruc 
tion,  and  fosters  growth  and  protects  from  error,  and 
whose  service  is  over  only  when  perfect  love  hath  cast 
it  out  and  the  child  is  reassured  in  the  arms  of  its 
mother  and  the  weary  soul  at  rest  in  the  bosom  of  God. 
The  fact  that  fear  is  rational  is  what  makes  fortitude 
divine.  Emerson's  optimism  as  to  the  constitution  of 
the  universe — essentially  unmodified,  as  I  have  said, 
by  his  asperity  toward  both  human  kind  and  human 
institutions — is  too  blithe,  too  bland,  too  confident.  His 
ideal  of  independence  and  non-conformity  is  easily 
made  to  sanction  guerilla  skirmishing  in  the  conflict  of 
life,  which  is  serious  enough  for  a  concerted  campaign. 
It  undervalues  the  enemy's  strength.  Doubtless  one 
can  so  station  the  camera  of  his  mind  as  to  catch  the 
universe  at  Emerson's  angle  and  identify  his  "percep 
tion"  of  positive  good  everywhere  with  negative  evil 
as  an  insubstantial  and  illusory  shadow — "captive  ill 
attending  captain  good."  The  youthful  Goethe,  aged 
six,  at  the  time  of  the  Lisbon  earthquake  did  so,  and 
reported  his  vision  of  the  truth  that  a  mortal  accident 
cannot  affect  an  immortal  spirit.  But  it  is  difficult  to 
"hold  the  position" — which  requires  a  dervish  tension 
and  its  accompanying  insensibility.  The  slightest  shift 
ing  of  even  the  purely  intellectual  point  of  view  discloses 
the  old  panorama.  Pain  hurts,  poverty  pinches,  bereave 
ment  is  bitter,  injustice  cruel,  remorse  torture.  If  evil 
is  but  the  shadow  of  good,  its  blackness  leaves  any 
but  an  invincibly  optimistic  temperament  sadder  still 
by  minimizing  the  moral  order  in  rendering  it  less  sub- 

174 


EMERSON 

stantial  and  therefore  less  apt  a  field  for  calculable 
conflict.  Moreover,  how  explain  sin — the  choice  of 
evil?  To  call  sin  "good  in  the  making,"  to  ascribe  it 
to  some  "circle"  or  other  in  following  which  the  "ways 
of  the  wicked"  are  made  to  serve  the  harmony  of  the 
spheres,  is  to  minimize  its  gravity  and  "wither"  the 
individual  with  a  vengeance.  But  Emerson  is  always 
minimizing  when  he  is  not  magnifying  the  individual — 
an  inevitable  alternation,  perhaps,  in  an  intellectual 
philosophy  that  ignores  conscience,  and  considers 
potentialities  to  the  exclusion  of  responsibilities.  As  a 
part  of  the  universe,  you  are  a  veritable  mouche  de 
coche,  and  whatever  you  do  is  muted  in  the  celes 
tial  symphony.  As  an  individual,  consciousness  it 
self  gives  a  glowing,  an  almost  incredible  account 
of  your  capacities.  Conscience,  however,  is  another 
matter. 

Emerson  was  "all  his  days,"  says  Henry  James,  Sr., 
"an  arch-traitor  to  our  existing  civilized  regimen,  inas 
much  as  he  unconsciously  managed  to  set  aside  its 
fundamental  principle,  in  doing  without  conscience. 
.  .  .  He  had  no  conscience,  in  fact,  and  lived  by  per 
ception,  which  is  an  altogether  lower  or  less  spiritual 
faculty."  His  neglect  of  conscience  is  undoubtedly  due 
in  large  measure  to  his  personal  immunity  from  its 
mordant  functioning.  Unlike  the  youth — tenderly  nur 
tured  in  the  lap  of  Calvinism — who  expressed  surprise 
at  hearing  of  an  approving  one,  his  own  must  have  been 
radiantly  commending.  It  was  easy  for  him  to  affirm 
that  "no  man  can  afford  to  waste  his  moments  in 

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AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

compunction."  Personal  blamelessness  conjoined  with 
modesty,  which  in  Emerson  was  correspondingly 
marked,  naturally  induce  optimism.  There  is  nothing 
like  sin  to  give  one  a  gloomy  view  of  the  universe.  It  is 
the  ally  and  often  the  parent  of  cynicism,  doubtless, 
and  its  natural  tendency  is  to  impair  philosophic  integ 
rity — since  its  concomitant  is  suffering  and  suffering  of 
any  sort  deflects  and  distorts.  But  culture  as  well  as 
experience  feels  the  lack  of  depth  in  any  philosophy  that 
ignores  conscience.  This  is  a  far  more  essential  differ 
ence  between  Emerson  and  Carlyle  than  the  greater 
suavity  of  the  former  by  which,  aptly  coupling  them  as 
exponents  of  "personal  idealism,"  Professor  Eucken — 
the  latest  German  authority  on  philosophy — distin 
guishes  the  two.  Carlyle  surely  has  more  depth.  Nor 
with  all  his  arrogance  did  he  have  less  humility.  It  is 
impossible  to  have  less.  In  the  sense  in  which  the  word 
that  epitomizes  Epictetus  is  fortitude,  Marcus  Aurelius 
resignation,  early  Christianity  renouncement,  the  "  ages 
of  faith"  humilitas,  the  Renaissance  emancipation,  the 
eighteenth  century  enlightenment — Emerson  is  summed 
up  in  confidence.  He  is  as  much  outside  the  current  of 
ethical  evolution  as  of  Newman's  trend  of  doctrinal  devel 
opment.  He  has  the  pride  which  Meredith  aptly  called 
Pagan.  He  is  not  arrogant  in  spirit  but  autocratic  in 
attitude.  The  attitude  of  "  The  Problem  "  is  even  exult 
ant.  He  has  not  the  defiant  note  of  Henley's  "  Invictus  " 
or  the  insouciance  of  Stevenson's  gaudium  certaminis. 
But  his  confidence  indubitably  recalls  writers  of  this 
slightly  aggressive  order,  rather  than  the  deeper  notes 

176 


EMERSON 

of  the  masters  who  interpret  life  with  more  deference, 
if  not  with  a  greater  sense  of  dependence  on,  than  of 
unison  with,  the  divine.  No  wonder  Nietzsche  habitu 
ally  carried  one  of  his  volumes  in  his  pocket.  If 
Socrates  is  "terribly  at  ease  in  Zion,"  Emerson  is 
elate  there.  And  only  those  for  whom  elevated  ela 
tion  is  an  equivalent  of  depth,  will  find  in  a  philoso 
phy  of  intellectual  pride  and  moral  confidence  the 
soundness  and  substance  for  which  culture  as  well 
as  conscience  calls.  In  this  regard  those  on  whose 
hearts  at  the  present  day  the  sentences  of,  for  example, 
the  "General  Confession"  of  the  Anglican  ritual  no 
longer 

"Fall  like  sweet  strains — " 

will  echo  more  spontaneously  than  the  elation  of 
Emerson's  confidence,  the  deeper  solemnity  of  such  a 
passage  as  this  of  Fitzjames  Stephen's: 

We  stand  on  a  mountain  pass  in  the  midst  of  whirling  snow  and 
blinding  mist  through  which  we  get  glimpses  now  and  then  of 
paths  which  may  be  deceptive.  If  we  stand  still,  we  shall  be 
frozen  to  death.  If  we  take  the  wrong  road  we  shall  be  dashed 
to  pieces.  We  do  not  certainly  know  whether  there  is  any  right 
one.  What  must  we  do?  "Be  strong  and  of  a  good  courage.'* 
Act  for  the  best,  hope  for  the  best,  and  take  what  comes.  If 
death  ends  all,  we  cannot  meet  it  better.  If  not,  let  us  enter 
whatever  may  be  the  next  scene  like  honest  men,  w^th  no  sophis-  . 
try  in  our  mouths  and  no  masks  on  our  faces,  y  $*  *  n  i£ 

A*^  ^ 

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"^oxr;) 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

VI 

Its  genesis  naturally  furnishes  the  key  to  Emerson's 
style.  It  is  that  of  the  pulpit  modified  by  the  lyceum, 
and  the  forensic  element  struggles  in  it  with  the  literary. 
Its  ideal  is  eloquence^  not  exposition,  and  it  is  more  than 
likely  that  this  ideal  affected  his  thought  as  well — 
manner  so  marked  inevitably  reacting  on  matter. 
Now-a-days  it  is  an  effort  to  recall  this  ideal  of  but  a 
generation  ago,  in  the  light  of  which  however  it  some 
times  seems  as  if  our  current  literature  were  quite 
content,  so  far  as  style  is  concerned,  to  be  thoroughly 
second  rate  so  long  as  it  is  simple  and  clear.  Style  in 
deed,  properly  so  called,  may  be  said  not  to  have  sur 
vived  Spencer's  philosophy  of  it.  But  a  few  decades 
ago,  in  New  England  at  least,  it  was  very  generally 
esteemed  an  essential  element  of  writing,  and — no 
doubt  to  its  detriment  in  a  certain  degree — inextricably 
associated  with  eloquence.  How  it  sounded  was  hardly 
less  important  than  how  it  read,  in  the  consideration 
of  a  composition  even  of  an  exclusively  literary  char 
acter.  Oratory  was  still  studied  and  practised,  and 
imposed  its  criteria  outside  its  own  confines.  In  early 
days  I  do  not  myself  recall  that  Plato  or  Thucydides 
was  ever  signalized  as  a  master  of  style,  though  the 
simplicity  of  the  one  and  the  compression  of  the  other 
were  of  course  noted  and  commended.  The  models  set 
before  youth,  at  least  as  late  as  Emerson's  prime,  were 
Demosthenes,  Isocrates,  Cicero,  Burke,  Webster.  In 
point  of  style  no  purely  literary  influence  exerted  over 

178  " 


EMERSON 

the  youth  of  that  day  was  more  marked  than  that  of 
Phillips.  And  certainly  I  have  never  encountered  since, 
in  whatever  field  of  activity,  any  artistic  expression 
that  produced  the  effect  of  perfection  at  once  more 
singly  and  more  fully  than  one  of  his  lectures  did.  We 
went  to  his  lectures  in  preference  to  the  theatre.  His 
reserve  and  dignity;  his  concentrated  power  exhibited 
in  grace,  and  intensity  manifested  in  suavity;  his  serenity 
which  simulated  elevation  and  the  courtliness  with 
which  it  clothed  absolute  venom — every  trait  of  his 
technic  was  the  acme  of  that  taste  which  Emerson 
identifies  with  the  love  of  beauty  and  which  realized 
for  his  hearers  their  purest  ideals  of  eloquence  as  an 
art.  It  was  small  wonder  that  for  so  many  of  them  the 
distinction  between  oral  and  written  expression  even  as 
an  ideal  was  only  disclosed  later,  by  wider  and  different 
experiences,  and  that  exclusively  literary  prescriptions 
should  have  seemed  to  lack  vitality  in  the  presence  of  a 
living  model  of  such  commanding  quality. 

A  similar  influence,  during  his  formative  period,  was 
undoubtedly  exercised  over  Emerson  by  Everett.  In 
early  days  he  admired  Everett — to  a  degree  which,  since 
the  episode  of  Everett's  overshadowing  at  Gettysburg, 
perhaps,  has  been  popularly  incomprehensible.  He 
testifies  that  "the  word  that  he  spoke,  in  the  manner 
in  which  he  spoke  it,  became  current  and  classical  in 
New  England."  "Not  a  sentence,"  he  continues,  "was 
written  in  academic  exercises,  not  a  declamation  at 
tempted  in  the  college  chapel,  but  showed  the  omnipres 
ence  of  his  genius  to  youthful  heads."  Everett  and 

179 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

Emerson — it  is  hard  to  think  of  a  more  incongruous 
association!  The  connecting  link  is  the  ideal  of  elo 
quence.  Like  many  more  important  writers,  Everett 
is  no  longer  read.  But  Emerson's  eulogy  of  his  style 
is  specific  and  convincing.  There  are  many  echoes  in 
this  panegyric  of  his  own  procedure:  "He  had  great 
talent  for  collecting  facts,  and  for  bringing  those  he 
had  to  bear  with  ingenious  felicity  on  the  moment. 
.  .  .  All  his  learning  was  available  for  the  purposes 
of  the  hour.  ...  It  was  so  coldly  and  weightily 
communicated  from  so  commanding  a  platform  as  if 
in  the  consciousness  and  consideration  of  all  history 
and  all  learning — adorned  with  so  many  simple  and 
austere  beauties  of  expression,  and  enriched  with  so 
many  excellent  digressions  and  significant  quotations 
.  .  .  All  his  auditors  felt  the  extreme  beauty  and  dig 
nity  of  the  manner,  and  even  the  coarsest  were  con 
tented  to  go  punctually  to  listen,  for  the  manner, 
when  they  had  found  out  that  the  matter  was  not  for 
them  .  .  .  He  abounded  in  sentences."  I  have  quoted 
so  much  because  it  is  all  so  strikingly  applicable  to 
Emerson  himself.  In  the  matter  of  style  a  writer  never 
fully  recovers  from  his  early  admirations;  they  are  such, 
doubtless,  because  his  nature  responds  to  them.  And 
perhaps  the  seven  preachers  of  his  ancestry  had  trans 
mitted  to  Emerson  the  taste  and  the  talent  for  treating 
the  written  as  if  it  were  the  spoken  word  and  pre 
disposed  him  to  admire,  and  later  to  emulate,  the 
oratorical  manner  of  which  Everett  was — with  what- 
ever  reservations  in  respect  of  artificiality,  unappre- 

180 


EMERSON 

ciated   by   his  youthful  adorer — the  most   admirable 
exponent  in  his  day. 

To  the  present  generation  it  is  almost  needful  to  pro 
test  that  eloquence  and  oratory  are  not,  normally, 
varieties  of  tasteless  inflation  and  tropical  excess,  that 
they  are  not  of  necessity  alloyed  with  the  meretricious. 
At  all  events  in  Emerson's  case,  his  early  ideals  and  his 
subsequent  practice  in  the  lyceum  pulpit,  are  undoubt 
edly  largely  responsible  for  what  is  the  salient  merit  of 
his  style — for  the  fact  that  what  he  wrote  has  the  vitality 
of  the  spoken  word.  Every  sentence  is  addressed  to 
the  mind  directly.  It  has  a  complete  value  in  itself, 
and  is  not  merely  contributory  to  any  general  cumulative 
effect.  So  far,  accordingly,  as  the  prevailing  blandness 
of  his  nature  permits,  it  is  decidedly  a  sententious  style. 
But  blandness  is  also  an  obvious  element  of  it  and 
bridges  the  absence  of  transitions,  or  at  least  softens  it, 
so  that  while  your  attention  receives  really  a  constant 
succession  of  stimuli,  they  almost  blend  in  the  equiva 
lence  of  tendency.  As  there  is  no  reasoning  there  is  no 
appeal  to  the  reasoning  faculties  and  you  turn  the  pages 
even  more  submissively  than  you  follow  an  orator,  con 
scious  only  of  a  series  of  apprehensions.  And  each 
paragraph,  each  sentence — sometimes  nearly  every 
word — is  instinct  with  individual  effectiveness,  often 
conceived  with  a  wonderful  intuitive  sense  of  beauty 
and  fitness,  always  chosen  with  a  wonderful  felicity  of 
selection,  incisive,  apt,  illuminating  and  on  occasion 
fairly  vibrant  with  charm.  His  vocabulary  is  a  marvel 
of  eclecticism — drawn  from  all  fields,  from  poetry  to 

181 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

science,  from  the  country  of  the  imagination  to  that  of 
every  day  existence,  ranging  from  the  most  exotic  to 
the  most  familiar,  the  most  ornate  to  the  most  ordinary, 
\  and  excluding  nothing  but  the  pedantic  and  the  medi 

ocre.  No  writer  ever  possessed  a  more  distinguished 
verbal  instinct,  or  indulged  it  with  more  delight.  He 
fairly  caresses  his  words  and  phrases  and  shows  in 
his  treatment  of  them  a  pleasure  nearer  sensuousness, 
perhaps,  than  any  other  he  manifests.  Everywhere  his 
diction  is  penetrated  with  these  essential  traits  of  elo 
quence — traits  enduing  mere  expression  with  values  of 
force,  of  weight,  of  heightened  and  intensified  vigor, 
that  in  Emerson  combine  to  weave  the  garment  of 
vitality  itself. 

On  the  other  hand,  the  lack  of  continuity  is  obvious. 
His  inconsequences  of  expression  image  his  inconsecu- 
tiveness  of  thought  with  even  more  than  the  natural 
closeness.  They  increased  in  the  transformation  of  his 
lectures  into  essays,  which  with  him,  owing  precisely 
to  his  sense  for  form  in  the  restricted  degree  in  which 
he  possessed  it,  was  a  process  rather  of  pruning  than 
development.  The  lectures  that  became  essays  were 
fastidiously  and  relentlessly  compressed  instead  of 
expanded  and  the  method  is  another  demonstration  of 
his  individuality — the  usual  method  being  the  extension 
of  notes  into  fuller  and  rounder  completeness.  At 
times  the  effect  of  his  page  is  that  of  a  series  of  ejacula 
tions,  so  exaggeratedly  episodic,  indeed,  as  to  be  more 
comparable  with  the  aphoristic  style  of  La  Rochefou 
cauld  or  Vauvenargues  than  with  that  of  even  La 

182 


EMERSON 

Bruyere,  and  when  he  sinks  below  his  level,  not  without 
suggestions  of  what  he  himself,  I  think,  somewhere 
speaks  of  as  the  style  of  the  almanac.  Sometimes, 
indeed,  this  manner  acts  with  him  as  a  kind  of  auto- 
infection,  owing  to  his  very  sensitiveness  to  nuances  of 
the  kind,  and  you  feel  pelted  with  particles  rather  than 
presented  with  any  whole  whatever — not  to  speak  of 
organic  completeness.  But  it  is  to  be  borne  in  mind 
that  the  lack  of  continuity  in  Emerson's  style  in  gen 
eral  does  not  exclude  passages  of  such  substantial  extent 
as  really  to  count  as  periods.  And  such  passages  so 
count  in  virtue  not  only  of  extent,  but  of  character; 
they  are  in  construction  and  rythmic  sentiment  truly 
periodic.  His  eloquence  is  not  merely  pointed,  but  on 
occasion — when  in  fact  he  indulges  the  weakness  of 
lingering  over  a  thought  instead  of  uttering  another— 
sustained.  It  is  needless  to  say  this  is  a  disposition  he 
does  not  abuse.  Nevertheless  his  habitual  and  pre 
vailing  elevation  of  mind  and  mood  is  such  that  in  the 
kind  of  passage  to  which  I  refer,  hardly  any  prose  is 
richer  than  his.  No  writer  ever  had  in  more  opulent 
measure  the  unusual  power  of  maintaining  throughout 
varied  thematic  modulation  a  single  tone,  a  central 
thought,  until  the  expression  of  its  strict  implications 
was  complete,  and  one  after  another  of  its  phrasings 
apt  for  echo  in  eloquent  unison.  Eloquence,  in  fact, 
either  of  word,  phrase  or  passage,  pervades  his  style  as 
a  flavor;  it  is  present  as  a  distinct,  and,  indeed,  domi 
nant  element  and  governs  the  entire  technic,  already 
germinant  in  its  inspiration. 

183 


f   t^t  AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

What  his  style  lacks  is  art  in  the  larger  sense.  It  is 
distinctly  the  style  of  a  writer  who  is  artistic,  but  not 
an  artist — to  apply  to  himself  the  useful  distinction  he 
applied  to  Goethe.  He  had  no  sense  of  composition; 
his  compositions  are  not  composed.  They  do  not  con 
stitute  objective  creations.  They  have  no  construction, 
no  organic  quality — no  evolution.  He  is  above  the 
"degradation"  of  resort  to  the  elementary,  but  in  some 
guise  or  other  fundamental,  machinery  of  rhetorical 
presentation — the  succession  of  exordium,  theme,  con 
clusion.  His  essays  often  begin  happily  with  an  arousing, 
stimulant  utterance,  but  there  is  no  graded  approach  to 
any  distinguishable  middle,  followed  in  turn  by  some 
end;  they  do  not  terminate,  but  cease.  His  sense  of 
form — exquisite  where  purity  and  simplicity  are  con 
cerned — disappears  in  the  presence  of  complexity  and 
elaboration.  The  impressiveness  of  a  work  of  art  re 
sides  largely  in  the  relations  between  its  larger  values, 
but  Emerson  has  no  larger  values.  The  details  them 
selves — often,  as  I  say,  beautiful,  and  caressingly  bur 
nished — are  not  grouped  in  active  interdependence, 
and  consequently  do  not  constitute  parts.  A  Jortiori 
there  is  no  whole,  and  as  a  rule,  the  essays  do  not  leave 
a  very  definite  single  impression,  so  far  as  the  rein 
forcement  of  the  theme  by  the  treatment  is  concerned. 
You  get  the  idea  that  "self-reliance"  is  a  fine  thing,  but 
not  how,  or  why,  or  with  what  qualifications.  The  de 
tail  of  such  essays  as  "Power,"  "Success,"  "  Greatness," 
is  almost  interchangeable.  His  way  of  working,  com 
bined  with  his  depreciation  of  effort,  made  this  inevi- 

184 


EMERSON 

table.  He  read,  walked  and  meditated  eight  or  nine 
hours  a  day,  thus  accumulating  golden  nuggets  of 
thought,  but  without  the  direction  of  the  will  his 
meditation  was  of  necessity  desultory,  and  when  sub 
sequently  he  subtracted  from  his  accumulation  of  nug 
gets  enough  for  a  lecture  or  an  essay  their  classifica 
tion  was  perforce  rather  arbitrary.  It  is  only  nature 
that  can  be  trusted  to  work  thus  at  hap-hazard, 
and  even  Pactolus  was  a  stream,  not  a  moraine.  For 
man's  creation  art  is  rigorously  requisite.  And  art  in 
the  constructive  sense  found  no  echo  in  Emerson's 
nature. 

In  general  terms,  to  be  sure,  he  says  the  most  search 
ing  things  about  it.  About  what  subject  of  human 
concern,  indeed,  does  he  fail  to?  There  is  no  witness 
of  his  wisdom,  of  the  wide  embracing  character  of  his 
intellect,  more  striking  than  some  of  his  deliverances 
about  its  character  and  scope  largely  considered,  for, 
being  temperamentally  without  sensuous  strain,  he 
looked  through  things  rather  than  at  them.  It  is  true 
that  any  writer  coming  after  Goethe,  has  small  excuse 
for  error  as  to  essential  and  constitutional  aesthetic 
principles.  And  in  part  no  doubt,  he  owes  his  felicity 
in  dealing  with  these  to  the  culture  he  depreciates,  to 
his  having  read  Goethe.  But  he  read  him  with  sym 
pathetic  comprehension  and  the  preparedness  due  to 
his  own  extraordinarily  unerring  intuition.  Sentences 
such  as  these  occur  in  his  earliest  book:  "The  love  of 
beauty  is  taste,"  "The  creation  of  beauty  is  art," 
"Thus  is  art,  a  nature  passed  through  the  alembic  of 

185 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

man,"  "The  integrity  of  impression  made  by  manifold 
natural  objects,"  "  There  is  no  object  so  foul  that  in 
tense  light  will  not  make  it  beautiful,"  "The  sensual 
man  conforms  thoughts  to  things;  the  poet  conforms 
things  to  his  thoughts,"  "The  charming  landscape  I  saw 
this  morning  is  indubitably  made  up  of  some  twenty 
or  thirty  farms.  Miller  owns  this  field,  Locke  that, 
and  Manning  the  woodland  beyond.  But  none  of  them 
owns  the  landscape.  There  is  a  property  in  the  horizon 
which  no  man  has,  but  he  whose  eye  can  integrate  all 
the  parts,  the  poet."  If  he  had  here  taken  one  step 
further  and  added  that  the  artist  is  he  who  can 
express  this  integration,  unfold  this  involution,  he 
would  have  established  the  exact  category  of  art. 
This  step,  however,  undoubtedly  implies — even  with 
Claude — the  effort  he  disesteemed.  He  never  took 
it  himself,  nor  did  he  value  the  results  of  others  in 
taking  it. 

His  remark  of  Goethe,  just  referred  to,  that  "this 
law-giver  of  art  is  not  an  artist"  is  far  more  applicable 
to  himself,  though  his  perception  of  the  lack  of  art  in 
Goethe's  works  is  creditably  paradoxical  in  him.  One 
argues  that  its  absence  in  Goethe  is  perceived  and  not 
felt  by  him — more  suo;  if  to  acuteness  of  perception 
were  added  the  sincerity  of  feeling,  he  would  have  been 
less  sweeping.  Is  not  the  first  part  of  " Faust"  artistic  ? 
And  are  not  Goethe's  classical  productions  correct  to 
the  point  of  coldness?  In  his  own  case,  at  any  rate, 
what  he  betrays  in  his  attitude  toward  art  is  sapience, 
not  sensitiveness.  The  fact — considering  the  New 

186 


EMERSON 

England  of  his  day — is  still  another,  and  not  the  least 
significant,  evidence  of  his  powers  of  intellectual  divi 
nation.  As  to  these  one  is  constantly  tempted  to  ask 
oneself  in  reading  him,  if  .after  all  intellect  enough  is  not 
all-sufficient.  But  when  we  come  to  his  own  apprecia 
tion  of  art  in  the  concrete,  we  realize  how  little  it  meant 
to  him.  He  could,  as  in  the  case  of  Goethe,  recognize, 
and  even  regret,  its  absence,  but  actively  and  positively 
it  was  quite  indifferent  to  him.  The  real  and  funda 
mental  reason  for  this  I  suspect  to  be  that  he  was,  so 
to  speak,  his  own  artist,  and  had  as  little  need  of  or  use 
for  others,  in  other  realms  of  practice,  as  in  his  own. 
Perhaps,  by  his  favorite  law  of  compensation,  his  aloof 
ness  and  independence  were  balanced  by  a  correspond 
ing  self-sufficingness,  which  established  his  equipoise 
by  developing  the  extraordinary — though  of  course  far 
from  vain-glorious — egoism  that  is  so  marked  in  one 
nevertheless  so  serenely  unassuming.  What  he  de 
lights  in  is  nature,  and  in  nature  for  what  it  says,  not 
what  it  shows,  to  him.  He  can  perhaps  make  his  own 
synthesis — his  own  picture.  He  was  inexhaustibly 
synthetic  and  hardly  functioned  otherwise.  He  knows 
precisely,  as  I  have  said,  what  constitutes  the  picture. 
But  whether  he  can  or  not,  he  is  not  enough  interested 
in  it  to  communicate  it,  and  when  some  one  else  paints 
it,  it  is  not  his,  and  therefore  it  fails  to  interest  him  at  all. 
Nor  does  he  take  art  quite  seriously  enough  to  compre 
hend  what  may  be  called  its  physiology,  academically 
alive  as  he  is  to  its  essential  principles.  When  he  first 
saw  the  old  masters,  he  was  surprised  at  their  sim- 

187 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

plicity,  which  approves  his  penetration — the  philistine 
note  simply  never  appears  in  Emerson— but  it  is  plain 
that  he  deemed  this  end  easily  attained  by  them,  and 
ascriptible  to  the  direct  vision  of  genius.  His  maxim 
is  that  one  does  best  what  is  easiest  for  him  to  do — 
surely  a  transcendental  view  of  art,  aside  from  the 
notorious  truth  that  what  one  does  easily  is  not  worth 
doing,  unless  indeed  one  has  done  it  before  with  diffi 
culty.  He  did  not  linger  among  the  aforesaid  old 
masters,  moreover.  Mr.  Henry  James  records  that  on 
walking  with  him  through  the  galleries  of  the  Louvre 
and  the  Vatican,  "his  perception  of  the  objects  con 
tained  in  those  collections  was  of  the  most  general 
order " — doubtless  not  an  overstatement.  Europe,  in 
deed,  said  little  to  him  in  any  way.  Its  chief  interest 
for  Americans  is  probably  its  monuments  and  museums. 
And  for  him  these  treasures  were  negligible  as  having 
served  their  purpose — a  purpose  in  the  nature  of  things, 
according  to  his  philosophy,  needing  ceaseless  renewal, 
continuous  change.  Anything  static  tends  to  impede 
the  flux  that  was  his  ideal.  Doubtless  he  took  his 
world — the  kingdom  of  his  mind — with  him  on  each  of 
his  two  visits  abroad,  but  one  fancies  him  glad  to  be  at 
home  again,  where  the  concrete  forced  itself  less  on  the 
attention.  At  Concord,  certainly,  so  far  as  art  is  con 
cerned,  he  could  escape  it  altogether — cultivate  his 
cherished  propensity  for  whim,  and  listen  to  Alcott, 
and  call  Dante  "  another  Zerah  Colburn "  at  his  ease. 


188 


EMERSON 

VII 

It  is  the  absence  of  art,  too,  that  is  the  most  obvious  /^ 
weakness  of  his  poetry, .  where  it  is  of  much  more 
moment.  Imaginative  art  is  precisely  what  his  poetry 
lacks  to  give  it  classic  color  and  substance.  The 
Poems,  taken  as  a  whole,  constitute  an  expression 
altogether  inferior  to  that  of  the  Essays,  of  which  they 
are,  indeed,  a  kind  of  intimate  reverberation.  They  are 
largely  Emerson's  communion  with  himself,  as  the  Es 
says  are  his  communication  with  the  world.  And  since, 
so  far  as  form  goes  certainly,  even  communication  was  not 
a  matter  on  which  he  "wasted  the  day,"  he  is  naturally 
more  esoteric  and  elusive  in  what  one  is  inclined  to  call, 
for  the  most  part,  merely  articulate  meditation.  Poetry 
was  distinctly  an  avocation  with  him.  "The  rhyming 
fit  seldom  comes  to  me,"  he  acknowledged.  He  wrote  it 
to  please  himself — overflowed  tricklingly  in  verse  often 
more  careless  even  than  awkward,  cadenced  to  measures 
that  could  have  gratified  only  a  tuneless  ear,  and  con 
stituting  an  exercise  rather  than  an  expression.  I  do 
not  mean  that  he  did  not  take  it  seriously.  On  the  con 
trary  he  labored  it  now  and  then,  revised,  rewrote,  sup 
pressed  on  occasion.  I  fancy,  however,  that  he  did  this 
with  very  little  expenditure  of  the  effort  that  he  so  de 
preciated,  and  precisely  in  the  spirit  of  revising  an  exer 
cise  rather  than  by  the  more  arduous  process  of  "  taking 
thought"  which,  indeed,  had  he  taken  the  Muse  seri 
ously  enough  he  might  easily  have  found  quite  as  "de 
grading"  in  verse  as  in  his  truly  native  expression.  It 

189 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

can't  be  said  that  he  materially  bettered  what  he  changed. 
Taken  in  the  mass,  the  Poems  have  precisely  the  ex 
perimental,  tentative,  adventurous  air  with  which  this 
afterthought  order  of  treatment  in  the  case  of  a  few 
wholly  accords.  It  is  a  surprise  to  find  that  this  was 
certainly  not  his  own  view,  and  the  fact  argues  the  in 
sufficiency  of  his  poetic  ideal  as  well  as  performance. 
His  verse  has  assuredly  high  qualities,  and  in  elevation 
and  eloquence  ranks  with  his  prose — qualities  that  carry 
their  own  justification  with  them,  and  need  to  be  but 
tressed  by  no  illusions  as  to  the  native  felicity  of  their 
vehicle  of  expression.  He  insisted  that  he  was  a  born 
poet,  "of  inferior  rank,  no  doubt,  but  all  the  same  a 
poet,"  by  "  nature  and  vocation,"  and  maintained  that 
everything  in  him  proceeded  from  that.  But  he  was 
mistaken.  In  the  exact  sense  in  which  he  called  Goethe 
artistic,  but  not  an  artist,  we  may  say  of  him  (what  in 
deed  also  he  precisely  says  of  Shelley)  that  he  was 
poetic — oh!  distinctly — but  not  a  poet.  It  is  not  a 
little  significant  that  in  the  appreciative  and  really  monu 
mental  work  Mile.  Dugard  has  recently  published — 
"Emerson:  Sa  Vie  et  Son  GEuvre" — there  is  scarcely  a 
reference  to  the  Poems.  And  if,  considering  their  highly 
idiosyncratic  quality,  one  could  hardly  count  on  their 
passing  the  border  of  another  tongue,  the  strictures  of 
Swinburne  and  the  cool  estimate  of  Arnold  have  at 
least  the  weight  that  competence  and  comprehension 
carry.  In  this  country  the  elect  consensus  would  per 
haps  rank  Emerson  with  the  greatest  of  English  poets. 
But  this  is  one  of  the  literary  estimates  that  the  pres- 

190 


EMERSON 

ent  generation  has  inherited  from  Emerson's  own,  in 
which  the  more  exclusively  intellectual  ideals  imposed 
themselves  rather  imperiously.  Such  an  estimate  will 
infallibly  be  revised  when  it  is  realized  that,  quint 
essential  an  element  as  intellect  is  in  poetry  of  a  high 
order,  it  is  not  the  characterizing  element  of  poetry  at 
all — when  in  fact  we  either  produce  more  poetry  that  is 
distinctively  poetry  or  come  to  have  a  deeper  and  more 
exacting  sense  of  it. 

It  is  idle  to  maintain  that  a  true  poet,  a  poet,  that  is, 
to  whom  verse  is  his  native  medium,  would  have  written 
so  much  indifferent  and  so  little  real  poetry  as  Emerson. 
The  conclusion  from  the  obvious  data  is  irresistible  that 
his  extremely  exceptional  achievements  proceed  from  an 
equally  exceptional  inspiration.  This  is  to  say  that  a 
writer  of  unimpeachable  genius,  whose  native  medium 
is  prose,  may  occasionally  receive  from  the  high  gods  the 
impulse  and  the  capacity  to  transmute  into  the  gold  of 
perfect  and  beautiful  musical  expression  the  silver  of  his 
habitual  elevated  and  eloquent  substance.  It  is  not  at 
all  to  say  that  he  is  a  great  poet.  Nor,  of  course,  on  the 
other  hand,  is  it  to  say  that  he  is  incapable  of  great 
poetry.  But  the  aim  of  criticism  is  correct  characteri 
zation,  and  to  characterize  as  essentially  a  poet  a  writer 
whose  greatness  is  almost  invariably  apparent  in  his 
prose,  and  only  occasionally  in  his  verse,  is  mislead 
ing.  Professor  Woodberry,  a  poet  himself,  maintains 
that  Emerson  was  "fundamentally  a  poet  with  an  im 
perfect  faculty  of  expression."  One  differs  with  so  good 
a  judge  with  diffidence.  But  as  a  matter  of  fact  wher- 

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AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

ever  Emerson  shows  himself  a  poet  at  all,  his  faculty 
of  expression  is  perfection.  "When  Emerson's  line  is 
good,"  says  Mr.  Gilder — another  expert  and  practi 
tioner — "it  is  unsurpassably  good — having  a  beauty  not 
merely  of  cadence,  but  of  inner,  intense,  birdlike  sound: 
the  vowels,  the  consonants,  the  syllables,  are  exquisitely 
musical."  The  adverbs  are  enthusiastic,  but  the  de 
scription  is  just;  just  and  extremely  accurate.  The 
difficulty  is  that  his  line  so  rarely  is  good,  or  at 
any  rate,  that  his  goodness,  from  the  point  of  view 
of  poetry,  is  so  generally  confined  to  his  "line." 
And  as  I  say  it  is  the  "mass"  that  county,  here  as 
elsewhere. 

So  slight  is  the  proportion  of  admirable  to  negligible 
verse  in  the  Poems  that  one  feels  like  saying  that  he  can 
repeat  all  of  Emerson's  poetry  that  repays  reading. 
It  is  true  that  of  the  poetry  one  knows  by  heart,  the 
proportion  of  Emerson's  to  that  of  other  poets  is  more 
considerable.  At  least  this  is  true  in  America,  partly 
no  doubt  because,  as  with  Lowell,  patriotism  and 
nature — particularly  our  variety  of  each,  one  may  say — 
are  the  twin  inspirations  of  his  muse.  The  "embattled 
farmers"  lines  or  " Muscatequit "  would  naturally  be 
less  popular  in  England.  But  the  popularity  of  some 
of  his  lines  with  us  contradicts  Arnold's  contention  that 
Emerson  fails  to  answer  this  elementary  but  essential 
test.  Almost  any  lover  of  poetry  among  us  can  repeat 
"Brahma"  and  "The  Problem"  and  "Terminus"; 
and  a  substantial  number  of  more  isolated  "lines"  than 
those  aggregated  under  these  titles,  is  as  familiar  to 

192 


EMERSON 

most  of  us  as  the  instances  of  household  words  given 

by  Arnold: 

"Things  are  in  the  saddle, 
And  ride  mankind," 

for  example,  as  familiar  as 

"Patience  on  a  monument,  smiling  at  grief." 

Emerson's  aptness  in  aphorism,  so  marked  in  his 
prose,  naturally  serves  him  to  the  same  good  purpose 
in  verse.  He  can  pack  his  thought  so  close  that  when 
it  is  exceptionally  elevated  in  idea,  it  almost  falls  of 
itself  into  lyric  expression.  When  it  is  not,  the  compact 
ness  itself  remains  attractive,  as  in  the  lines  just  quoted, 
while  the  poetry  evaporates.  As  poetry  of  course  one 
can  only  contrast  these  with  Shakespeare's  charming 
image.  And  though  other  collocations  more  favorable 
to  Emerson  might  readily  be  made,  this  answers  as  well 
as  any  to  indicate  the  distinction  between  Emerson's 
verse  in  general  and  such  imaginative  art  as  that  of 
the  poet  to  whom  poetry  is  a  native  expression,  who 
sees  truth  in  images  rather  than  in  propositions  and 
whose  imaginative  faculty  is  at  home  in  construction 
rather  than  exclusively  in  statement — artistic  or  other. 
Mr.  Gilder  says  Emerson  is  "preeminent  in  his  power 
to  put  a  moral  idea  into  artistic  form,"  and— perhaps 
reading  "eminent"  for  "preeminent" — very  truly,  I 
think.  But  not  often  in  imaginative  form.  The  noble 
figure  he  cites  of  the  Departing  Day  silent  and  scornful 
"under  her  solemn  fillet"  has  almost  too  few  congeners 
to  be  called  characteristic.  In  any  case  a  great  poem  is 

193 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

composed  not  of  a  moral  idea  but  of  many  moral  ideas, 
however  single  the  central  motive.  The  poem  is  a  con 
struction  of  their  interrelations  imaginatively  treated. 
For  imaginative  construction,  however,  Emerson  natur 
ally  had  as  little  faculty  as  for  the  more  mechanical 
analogous  requirement  of  mere  rhetoric.  The  seer  is 
not  constructive.  He  is  the  instrument  of  inspiration, 
the  exponent  of  intuition,  the  channel  of  celestial  wis 
dom,  not  the  artificer  that,  equally  with  the  artist  on 
any  plane,  the  poet — the  maker — must  be. 

The  poet  thus  parallels  the  ideal  and  abstract  world 
by  an  imaginative  counterpart  of  his  own  creation.  He 
does  not  interpret  it  in  verbal  terms,  rhythmic  or  other, 
of  merely  energetic  and  illuminating,  or  even  beautiful, 
rational  exposition.  He  must  create  rather  than  merely 
convey,  and  to  create  he  must  know  not  merely  to 
"sing"  but  "to  build  the  lofty  rhyme."  So  impera 
tive  is  construction  in  poetry  indeed  that  what  we  feel 
in  the  Essays  as  mere  lack  of  continuity  we  note  in  the 
Poems  as  positive  f ragmen tarin ess.  Emerson's  genius 
has  not  the  opulence  that  is  profitably  compressed  by 
poetic  form.  His  thought  needs  no  condensation  nor 
confinement  and  in  metrical  order  acquires  no  energy — 
as  substance  that  is  rich  and  full  so  often  does.  The 
constructive  imagination  is  replaced  in  him  by  no 
small  degree  of  fancy,  but  whereas  the  material  of 
the  former  is  the  concrete,  fancy,  in  Emerson  at  least, 
revels  in  the  abstract  and  frolics— to  use  one  of  his 
favorite  words — in  the  realm  of  the  inner  not  the 
outer  sense.  Even  in  nature  it  is  not  the  concrete 

194 


EMERSON 

that  attracts  him.  Consider  these  lovely  lines— the 
oasis  of  "Woodnotes:" 

"Thou  canst  not  wave  thy  staff  in  air, 
Or  dip  thy  paddle  in  the  lake, 
But  it  carves  the  bow  of  beauty  there, 
And  the  ripples  in  rhymes  the  oar  forsake." 

Even  here  the  poet  is  not  so  much  noting  the  beauty  of 
the  phenomena  he  records,  as  inviting  our  attention  to 
the  law  underlying  them,  apparent  to  the  fancy  of  the 
inner  sense,  and  declared  not  without  a  truly  poetic  but 
distinct  tinge  of  the  didactic.  It  is  the  poetry  of  the 
poetic  seer.  And  the  lines  are  exceptional  in  Emerson's 
verse  in  which,  in  general,  significance  excludes  all 
sensuous  alloy;  whereas  the  poetic  ideal  insists  on  the 
fusion  of  sensuousness  with  significance.  The  latter 
element  in  fact  can,  by  definition  at  least,  be  better 
spared  than  the  former.  No  one  doubts  for  example 
the  titular  claims  of  Swinburne's  verse.  The  claims 
of  the  sensuous  element  in  poetry  are  unimpeachable 
since  the  concrete  is  its  corollary  and  blindness  to  the 
concrete  is  as  fatal  to  poetry  as  to  plastic  art.  It  is 
the  concrete,  in  fact,  that  makes  poetry  an  art.  Of 
course  it  is  the  abstract  in  art  as  well  as  elsewhere 
that  supplies  significance,  and'  all  art  that  surpasses  the 
merely  sensuous  is  a  statement,  as  well  as  an  image,  of 
truth.  For  that  matter,  philosophically  speaking,  every 
thing  constructed  ought,  of  course,  equally  with  every 
thing  existent  to  mirror  the  macrocosm — as  Emerson 
would,  and  probably  does  somewhere,  insist.  But  art 
is  a  magic  mirror  that  contributes  as  well  as  reflects, 

195 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

and  if  it  does  not  count  in,  as  well  as  for,  expression,  if 
in  other  words  it  lacks  or  even  dilutes  the  concrete,  it 
loses  its  characteristic  sanction. 

But  Emerson  not  only  has  no  sensuous  strain.  He 
is  deficient  in  sentiment.  Of  love,  as  understood  by  the 
poets — and  the  mass  of  mankind — he  had  his  habit 
ual  intellectual  and  not  emotionally  enlightened  con 
ception.  He  quite  comprehended  its  physiology.  To 
the  question  once  addressed  to  him:  "Do  you  believe 
in  Platonic  friendships  between  the  sexes?"  he  replied 
with  quaint  sapience:  "Yes,  but  'Hands  off'."  Surely 
wisdom  is  justified  of  her  children!  He  had,  however, 
no  sense  of  the  feeling,  and  of  the  two  great  instincts 
from  which  all  the  rest  that  actuate  humanity  are 
derived  it  is  extraordinary  how  exclusively  he  was 
possessed  by  that  of  self-preservation.  Emotional 
expansion — or  even  concentration — was  plainly  not  a 
need  of  his  ethereal  nature,  but  of  all  directions 
in  which  soul  or  sense  expands  that  of  romantic  love 
was  the  most  foreign  to  his  constitution.  Rather 
striking  confirmation  of  this,  were  any  needed,  is  fur 
nished  by  his  own  blindness  to  the  fact — almost  the 
only  instance  in  which  he  betrays  blindness  of  any 
kind.  "I  have  been  told,"  he  says,  "that  in  some  pub 
lic  discourses  of  mine  my  reverence  for  the  intellect 
has  made  me  unjustly  cold  to  the  personal  relations." 
And  he  protests  with  gentle  but  not  convincing  fervor. 
We  owe  him  the  charming  phrase:  "All  mankind  love 
a  lover."  But  the  kind  of  lover  he  means  is  he  who 
feels  warmly  "when  he  hears  applause  of  his  engaged 

196 


EMERSON 

maiden."  " Engaged"  is  charming,  too;  it  connotes 
Concord  and  its  regularity  in  essentials  whatever  its 
theological  heresies.  Yet  Emerson's  Muse  herself  never 
shows  any  such  sense  of  the  universal  passion  as,  to 
take  almost  the  first  instance  that  comes  to  mind,  is 
evinced  in  the  lines: 

"Then  there  were  sighs,  the  deeper  for  suppression, 

And  stolen  glances,  sweeter  for  the  theft, 
And  burning  blushes  though  for  no  transgression, 
Tremblings  when  met,  and  restlessness  when  left." 

His  nearest  approach  to  this  is  where,  in  describing 
with  penetrating  frigidity  the  disillusionment  of  finding 
"that  several  things  which  were  not  the  charm  have 
more  reality  than  the  charm  itself  which  embalmed 
them"  he  speaks  finely  of  the  lover's  youth  "when  he 
became  all  eye  when  one  was  present,  and  all  memory 
when  one  was  gone."  But  given  any  theme  he  could 
be  eloquent  upon  it.  He  is  less  himself  in  his  figure 
than  in  the  remark  that  precedes  it.  The  latter  savors 
more  of  the  "new  and  true"  to  which  in  this  sphere  as 
elsewhere,  in  the  main,  he  consecrated  his  expression. 
The  passions  are  too  primitive  for  him.  He  moves 
more  freely  amid  higher  differentiations.  "There,  that 
is  done"  one  can  fancy  him  exclaim,  in  finishing  his 
essay  on  "Love,"  which,  however,  agreeably  avoids 
the  commonplace — a  genuine  distinction  for  a  "cosmic" 
writer.  But  Emerson  achieves  this  distinction  too 
easily,  too  readily.  Beautifully  wise  things  he  oc 
casionally  utters  about  love.  "Do  you  love  me,  means 
do  you  see  the  same  truth,"  for  example,  records 

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AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

exquisitely  the  lover's  longing  for  spiritual  fusion.  But 
even  here  a  part  stands  for  the  whole  and  we  gather 
that  a  negative  reply  would  merely  lead  the  inquirer, 
not  too  disconsolately,  to  seek  elsewhere  his  other  self. 
Had  it  been  he,  one  is  persuaded  that  he  never  would 
have  pleaded  for  "a  last  ride  together,"  and  at  most 
would  have  proposed  a  walk.  Such  an  admonition  as 
"we  must  not  contend  against  love  or" — what  he  seems 
to  imply  is  the  same  thing — "  deny  the  substantial  exist 
ence  of  other  people,"  certainly  witnesses  no  tempera 
mental  ardor. 

And  for  the  pathos  as  well  as  for  the  passion  of  love 
his  emotional  equability  is  too  perfect  to  suffer  any  real 
concern.  Neither  passion  nor  pathos,  nor  indeed  any 
depth  of  feeling  properly  to  be  called  human  fell  in 
with  Emerson's  scheme  of  things.  His  idealism  was 
essentially  intellectual  and  his  optimistic  philosophy 
excluded  emotional  elements  so  distracting  to  serenity 
and  so  menacing  to  what  he  probably  conceived  as  true 
spiritual  success.  One  may  almost  say  that  he  shrinks 
from  feeling,  and  when  it  seems  imminent  swiftly  sub 
stitutes  an  idea.  It  is  true  that  the  world  is  passably 
familiar  with  the  contrary  practice  and  that  here  as 
elsewhere  he  eludes  the  conventional.  As  another 
American  poet  observes: 

"If  love  alone  would  save  from  hell, 
Then  few  would  fail  of  heaven." 

Without  distinction,  thus — commensurable  with  his 
genius — in  art,  in  imaginative  construction,  in  concrete 

198 


EMERSON 

imagery,  in  sensuousness  or  in  sentiment,  Emerson's 
poetry  is,  like  his  philosophy,  very  largely  an  affair  of 
the  intellect.  And  even  as  such  it  is  fragmentary,  in 
conclusive,  and  only  now  and  then  lighted  by  felicities, 
mainly  of  "line"  and  rarely  long  enough  to  satisfy  the 
sense  they  stimulate,  though  within  their  narrow  limits 
they  are  felicities  of  a  penetrating,  thrilling  pungency, 
inspired  by  a  peculiar  spiritual  elevation,  which  have 
been  never  perhaps  surpassed,  and  certainly  never  quite 
matched.  But,  save  f ragmen tarily,  the  intellect  unaided 
will  not  produce  great  poetry.  Browning's  poetry  is 
great  poetry  and  no  one  will  deny  that  it  is  intellectual 
poetry.  Its  secret,  however,  is  disclosed  in  Browning's 
expressed  conviction,  "Little  else  is  worth  study  save 
the  development  of  a  soul" — a  statement  of  which  all 
three  terms  are  distinctly  un-Emersonian :  study,  de 
velopment,  and — in  Browning's  sense — the  soul.  The 
heights  Emerson  sometimes  attains — never,  I  think,  the 
depths  he  sounds — cause  his  missing  true  greatness  in 
poetry  to  arouse  a  sense  of  frustration.  He  seems  to 
have  rented  a  lodge  on  the  slopes  of  Parnassus  and 
never  to  have  taken  the  fee  of  it,  and  his  home  is 
elsewhere.  Well,  then,  on  Olympus,  perhaps?  Cer 
tainly  of  the  two,  yes.  Even  so,  he  should  have  left 
some  masterpiece,  whereas  in  no  one  of  the  formal 
categories  of  poetry  can  he  be  enrolled  as  a  master. 
His  place  is  with  Epictetus,  Marcus  Aurelius,  Mon 
taigne,  Rabelais,  Pascal,  Sir  Thomas  Browne — 
with  the  wisdom  writers  of  the  world,  not  with 
the  poets.  And  just  as,  had  he  been  a  great  writer, 

199 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 


his  essays  would  have  been  constructed  by  toil  how 
ever  "degrading,"  some  at  least  of  his  poetry,  had 
he  been  a  great  poet,  would  have  had  a  monumental 
character — whereas  his  whole  work,  his  oeuvre,  is 
rather  a  cairn  than  a  structure,  with  of  course  dire  loss 
from  a  monumental  point  of  view.  Of  all  the  short 
comings  of  his  poetry,  indeed,  the  greatest,  I  think,  is 
this  lack  of  any  architectonic  quality  commensurate 
with  his  vision  and  vitality.  A  great  poet  who  never 
Wote  a  great  poem  is  an  anomaly.  One  who  never 
tried  to  is  not  fundamentally  a  poet,  however  poetic 
the  angle  from  which  he  viewed  the  universe  and 
whatever  the  radiance  that  plays  about  it  in  the  inter 
pretation  he  essayed.  Emerson's  real  greatness  appears 
in  the  Essays  in  which,  of  course,  as  I  have  said,  im 
aginative  art  is  less  essential  and  which  his  poetic  fancy 
lifts  as  much  above  "Proverbs"  as  his  formal  poetry 
falls  below  "Job." 

VIII 

The  Essays  are  the  scriptures  of  thought,  the  Vir- 
gilian  Lots  of  modern  literature.  To  open  anywhere 
any  of  the  volumes  (including  "Representative  Men," 
which  very  strictly  belongs  with  the  Essays)  is  to  be  at 
once  in  the  world  of  thought  in  a  very  particular  sense. 
The  abruptness  of  the  transition  is  a  part  of  the  sensa 
tion — like  that  of  landing  from  a  steamer,  or  leaving 
a  city  train  at  a  country  station  with  the  landscape 
stretching  out  green  and  smiling  in  the  morning  sun 
shine.  The  completeness  of  the  contrast  deepens  as 

200 


EMERSON 

you  go  forward  with  Emerson  into  the  day,  and  surrender 
yourself  to  his  influence  in  the  spirit  of  his  surrender  to 
his  inspiration.  This  is  the  mood  in  which  to  read  him 
— the  one,  that  is,  in  which  he  wrote.  Soon  you  are 
thinking  almost  in  his  diction.  Any  approach  to  the 
contentious  spirit  you  feel  would  affront  opportunity 
and  denounce  your  denseness  to  the  benignity  around 
you.  Even  the  critical  spirit  with  its  scrupulousnesses 
is  far  behind,  its  most  delicately  balanced  scales  a  rude 
apparatus,  and  the  thought  of  weighing,  an  impertinent 
blindness  to  the  imponderable  iridescence  that  shim 
mers  in  the  atmosphere,  electric  with  uplift  and  as 
piration.  For  it  is  the  world  of  moral  thought  that 
you  are  in.  The  phenomena  around  you  lose  their 
usual  aspect  and  individual  meaning,  and  what  you  are 
beholding  is  their  relations  in  principle  and  law,  now 
clear,  now  confused,  now  co-ordinate,  now  conflicting, 
but  always  significant  and  superior  to  "mere  understand 
ing  and  the  senses." 

It  is  this  that  most  saliently  characterizes  the  Es 
says — the  way  in  which  in  spite  of  lacuna  of  rhetorical 
connection  the  relations  of  things  are  elicited,  their  re 
lations  to  each  other,  to  the  cosmos,  to  the  individual. 
Every  statement  stimulates  thought  because  it  is  sug 
gestive  as  well  as  expressive.  Everything  means  some 
thing  additional.  To  take  it  in  you  must  go  beyond  it. 
The  very  appreciation  of  an  essay  automatically  con 
structs  a  web  of  thought  in  the  weaving  of  which  the 
reader  shares.  All  its  facts  are  illustrative,  all  its  data 
examples.  The  world  of  phenomena  is  lifted  to  the 

201 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

plane  of  principle,  where  if  it  loses  the  material  sub 
stance  with  which,  through  the  imagination,  art  and 
poetry  deal,  it  is  the  object  of  a  classifying  vision  that 
distributes  and  arranges  it  in  accordance  with  mutual 
affinities  and  general  laws,  and  in  this  way  draws  out 
its  utilities  for  the  mind.  Every  thought  is  pollent 
rather  than  purely  reflective.  And  if  Emerson  does 
not  preach  action  and  ignores  emotion,  the  state  of 
mind  he  induces  is  of  an  energetic  and  exhilarated 
character,  out  of  which  such  emotion  as  aspiration  may 
be  called  and  such  action  as  resolve  may  implicate  issue 
of  themselves.  He  stimulates  a  mood  at  all  events,  in 
which  effort  seems  needless,  compunction  useless,  con 
science  superfluous,  logic  a  fetter,  consistency  negligible, 
fear  contemptible,  courage  instinctive,  culture  exotic 
and  what  normally  we  recognize  as  unattainable  within 
easy  reach  of  one's  hand — a  mood,  that  is  to  say,  that 
dissipates  all  possible  criticism  of  him.  To  those  who 
can  convert  such  a  mood  into  a  permanent  state  of 
mind  and  habit  of  thought,  or  even  make  it  occasionally 
the  springs  of  conduct  and  performance,  the  Essays 
are  a  priceless  possession.  Those  who  cannot  can 
hardly  fail  to  find  it  exhilarating  that  instead  of  walk 
ing  crowned  with  inward  glory  and  finding  merely  his 
own  content  in  meditation,  he  should  have  walked  and 
meditated  his  daily  stint  out  of  reach  of  the  working 
world  and  out  of  touch  with  its  concerns — beholding 
them  in  the  wise  candor  of  perspective — and  should 
nevertheless  have  had  the  naivete*  or  the  sapience — 
which  is  it? — to  take  this  exceptional,  this  unique  ex- 

202 


EMERSON 

perience  and  procedure  as  normal  enough  to  be  preached 
practically  and  commended  confidently  to  weary  and 
struggling  mankind. 

And  scarcely  less  notable  than  the  method  that  gives 
it  such  vitality  is  the  material  of  the  Essays.  Emerson's 
mind  is  as  spacious  as  it  is  active,  and  as  stored  as  it  is 
spacious.  Not  a  scholar  in  any  strict  sense,  he  read 
as  much  as  he  reflected  and,  owing  to  his  extremely 
catholic  appreciativeness,  as  widely.  His  extraordinary 
power  of  assimilation  and  conversion  somewhat  ob 
scures  the  opulence  of  his  spoils.  Whatever  his  de 
preciation  of  culture  and  its  results  to  his  philosophy, 
the  tapestry  of  the  Essays  is  wonderfully  figured  with 
it.  Dr.  Holmes  gives  the  number  of  citations  they 
contain  as  3,393,  taken  from  868  writers.  And  the 
abundance  of  this  harvest  of  his  reading  is  less  impres 
sive  than  the  aptness  and  fecundity  of  everything — 
everything — quoted.  One  almost  sees  it  in  its  process 
of  transformation  into  the  proverbial  manifold  enrich 
ment  of  good  seed,  and  views  as  seed  the  grain  but 
freshly  reaped  from  the  ripest  fields  of  the  world's 
thought.  He  dips  into  the  bins  of  every  store-house 
and  draws  on  all  treasuries,  though  with  an  eclecticism 
so  personal  and  a  usage  so  prompt  that  one  fairly 
loses  sight  of  the  origin  of  the  material  with  which  he 
sows  and  builds.  It  is  there  nevertheless — an  encyclo 
paedia  of  others'  thought,  however  combined,  devel 
oped,  refined,  and  utilized  by,  as  well  as  embedded  in, 
his  own.  And  the  lessons  of  experience  he  drew  from 
every  source,  from  the  most  familiar  as  well  as  the 

203 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

most  recondite.  As  he  said  of  Plato  he  kept  "the 
two  vases,  one  of  ether  and  one  of  pigment,  at  his 
side"  and  illustrated  his  own  assertion:  "Things  used 
as  language  are  inexhaustibly  attractive."  Consider 
merely  the  titles  of  the  ten  volumes  of  Essays.  They 
form  a  catalogue  raisonne  of  wisdom,  of  wisdom  di 
vined  and  wisdom  garnered,  and  the  whole  beauti 
fully  and  winningly  as  well  as  pungently  alembicated 
by  an  indisputably  great  mind.  And  if  the  Essays 
are,  as  they  seemed  to  the  wisest  English  critic  of  the 
nineteenth  century,  the  most  important  work  in  Eng 
lish  prose  of  that  century,  it  is  because  they  are  the 
work  of  the  master  genius  of  wisdom  among  the 
writers  of  his  time. 


304 


POE 


FOE 


THERE  is  no  more  effective  way  of  realizing  the  dis 
tinction  of  Foe's  genius  than  by  imagining  American 
literature  without  him.  One  is  tempted  to  add  there 
is  no  other  way.  It  is  in  the  historic  rather  than  in 
the  critical  estimate  that  his  eminence  appears.  It 
owes  more  to  its  isolation  than  to  its  quality.  He  was 
extremely  individual,  the  entire  character  of  his  mind 
and  nature  is  acutely,  almost  painfully,  certainly  per 
versely,  personal;  but  his  originality  appears  chiefly 
in  relief  against  the  background  of  his  environment. 
If  he  did  not  feel  intensely,  he  thought  energetically, 
but  to  a  purport  more  familiar  in  older  societies  than 
in  our  own.  His  figure  acquires  outline  and  edge  from 
its  contrast  with  the  prevailing  Philistine  screen  which 
he  sedulously  kept  behind  it  and  on  which  he  made  it 
the  business  of  his  life  to  cast  the  sharpest  possible 
shadow.  He  was  from  the  first  in  complete  disaccord 
with  his  environment  and  lived  in  a  perpetual  state 
of  warfare  with  it.  His  parentage  was  bohemian,  his 
childhood  and  youth  dependent,  his  associations — in 
the  half  savage,  half  aristocratic  society  of  his  boy 
hood — expressly  favorable  to  the  development  of  the 

207 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 


imperious  beneficiary  whose  sense  of  his  own  powers 
and  of  his  lack  of  claims  brought  him  through  a  rather 
irregular  and  not  very  grateful  adolescence  to  the 
threshold  of  a  manhood  of  revolt.  There  is  a  whole 
literature  of  revolt  in  older  countries.  Our  only  Ish- 
mael  is  Poe.  But  if  not  unprecedented  in  the  history 
of  letters  he  was  sufficiently  salient  among  us,  and  the 
fact  that  so  generally  his  hand  was  against  every  man 
accentuated  his  individuality  in  the  natural  course  of 
apology  and  polemic. 

The  established  was  with  us  still  the  moral  and  the 
didactic.  Poe's  antagonism  instinctively  inclined  him 
to  art.  He  is  in  fact  the  solitary  artist  of  our  elder  liter 
ature.  This  is  his  distinction  and  will  remain  such. 
Hawthorne  is  in  a  degree  a  rival,  but  in  form  rather 
than  in  fond  as  his  addiction  to  allegory  attests  and 
in  any  case  his  puritan  preoccupation  with  the  moral 
forces  invalidates  his  purely  aesthetic  appeal.  Poe's 
art  was  unalloyed.  It  was  scrupulously  devoid,  at  any 
rate,  of  any  aim  except  that  of  producing  an  effect  and 
often  overspread  if  only  occasionally  clothed  with  the 
integument  of  beauty.  As  such  it  was  in  America 
at  the  time  an  exotic.  His  great  service  to  his  country 
is  in  a  word  the  domesticationTof  the  exotic.  Color, 
rhythm,  space,  strangeness,  were  his  " reals;"  they 
fascinated  his  mind  anoTtook  possession  of  his  else 
unoccupied  soul.  In  the  large  sense  thus  his  art  is 
in  strictness  to  be  called  exotic  rather  than  original. 
French,  German,  English  romanticism  had  preceded 
him.  He  pillaged  and  plagiarized  freely.  In  the 

208 


POE 

matter  of  literary  phase,  his  most  convinced  admirer 
and  most  thorough-going  apologist  observes  that  he 
came  at  the  close  of  an  epoch,  he  did  not  introduce  one. 
But  in  his  hands  the  method  and  even  the  material 
that  he  adopted  resulted  in  a  very  striking  body  of 
work,  which  still  has  the  compactness  and  definition  of 
a  monument.  And  if  he  contributed  little  he  passed 
on  the  torch.  Incarnated  in  the  vivid  forms  his  pro 
nounced  individuality  imagined,  illustrated  by  the 
energy  of  his  genius,  the  spirit  of  romantic  art  entered 
the  portals  of  our  literature  and  illuminated  its  staid 
precincts  to  the  end  of  variety  at  the  very  least.  What 
ever  her  responsibility  for  the  subsequent  riot  there, 
her  vivifying  influence  is  clear,  and  for  it  we  are  in 
debted  to  Poe. 


..     . 

The  artist,  by  definition,  exercises  his  activity  in 
exclusive  concentration  upon  his  effect.  In  so  far  as 
his  attention  swerves  from  that  he  modifies  his  dis 
tinctive  attitude.  He  may,  of  course,  soar  as  well  as 
sink  in  so  doing.  He  may,  for  instance,  forget  his 
Affect  in  the  rapture  of  expression  and  rise  to  poetry. 
But  unless,  in  so  doing,  his  sub-consciousness  at  least 
keeps  its  hold  on  his  effect  —  as,  for  example,  Tenny 
son's  always  did—  he  pretermits  his  purely  artistic 
function.  Thia^is  why,  in  aLjvorld  of  imperfections. 
the  most  nearly  perfect  art  is  so  often  the  least  satisf  ac- 
tory—  assumEg^tJ&FpoeHclo  be  thFufiimate  standard  ; 
why  the  perfection  of  Vermeer  fades  before  the  ir- 

209 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

regularities  of  Rembrandt;  why  we  turn  from  Veronese 
to  Tintoretto;  why  in  only  an  occasional  miracle  of 
genius  like  Raphael  at  his  best  do  we  find  a  stable 
fusion  of  spirit  and  statement;  why — to  descend  from 
august  illustration — readers  more  sensitive  to  art  than 
to  poetry  are  deceived  by  the  poetic  disguise  of  that 
arrant  artist,  Walt  Whitman,  who  achieved  a  fairly 
radiant  degree  of  perfection  in  never  yawping  his  com 
monplaces  off  the  key,  in  spite  of  the  variety  of  their 
modulations.  Like  Whitman's,  Poe's  attention  never 
wandered  a  moment  from  his  effect — even  in  his  poetry. 
Now  the  effect  in  poetry,  as  in  any  fine  art,  is  largely  a 
matter  of  technic,  and  a  great  deal  of  poetry  is  natu 
rally  over-valued,  because  it  answers  the  technical  test, 
because  in  short  it  sounds  well. 

In  the  first  place  its  technic  is  so  difficult  that,  when 
it  is  achieved  with  any  distinction,  it  is  rewarded  with 
at  least  the  temporary  appreciation  that  inevitably  re 
wards  the  tour  de  force.  The  technical  test  has  in  truth 
a  good  deal  to  say  for  itself  practically.  Winckelmann 
objected  to  artists'  criticism  of  art  that  it  naturally  made 
difficulty  overcome  the  test  of  achievement.  But  as  a 
matter  of  fact,  one  may  ask,  is  not  this  at  least  one  test, 
since  it  is  clearly  one  source  of  the  superiority  of  the 
superior  artist,  whose  laurels,  without  it,  would  be  worn 
equally  by  the  mute  and  the  inglorious,  not  to  say  the 
manifestly  incompetent  ?  What  one  can  say  is  that  it  is  in 
no  sense  the  test  of  the  artist's  inspiration,  and  that  this 
is,  after  all,  the  main  thing.  The  prodigious  difficulties 
of  the  art  of  poetry,  at  any  rate,  are  sufficiently  attested 

210 


POE 

by  the  abounding  surplusage  of  unsuccessful  attempts 
to  surmount  them.  Everyone  accordingly — except  ap 
parently  the  deluded  practitioner — is  struck  by  the 
exceptional  victory  when  he  encounters  it,  and  apt 
unconsciously  to  ascribe  to  inspiration  the  effect  really 
due  to  energy  and  skill,  forgetting  that  even  inspired 
skill  is  not  poetic  inspiration.  Much  of  the  admiration 
of  Foe's  poetry  is  of  this  kind.  Much  of  his  poetry  it 
self  can  be  admired  in  no  other  way. 

Moreover,  the  technic  of  poetry  is  so  multifarious,  so 
full  of  possibilities,  so  capable  of  producing  pleasure 
by  mere  rhyme  and  rhythm  that  with  many  readers  at 
all  times  and  with  all  readers  at  some  times  its  content 
is  lost  sight  of.  English  literature  has  a  wonderful  ex 
ample  of  this  in  the  poetry  of  Swinburne.  Swinburne  is 
incomparable,  but  Poe  has  something — a  tithe — of  the 
same  richness  of  rhythmic  resource,  though  his  num 
bers  are  artificial  at  times  and  at  times  tenuous  to  a 
degree  that  removes  them  from  even  superficial  classifi 
cation  with  the  opulent  spontaneity  and  splendor  of  the 
English  poet's  diction.  They  are,  too,  though  less 
richly,  more  exclusively,  technical,  leaning  thus  all 
the  more  heavily  on  technic.  And  his  technic,  being 
thus  the  main  factor  of  his  verse,  lacks  a  little  the  native 
felicity  only  to  be  secured  by  keeping  it  in  its  true 
relative  position.  Forced  out  of  its  proper  subordina 
tion  it  loses  its  grace  as  a  contributing  element  of  a 
larger  entity.  It,  instead  of  the  subject,  being  the 
poet's  main  concern,  its  theoretic  quality  becomes 
obvious.  It  acquires  a  positively  notional  air  with 

211 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

Poe  at  times — the  air  of  illustrating  the  notions  of  his 
negligible  "Philosophy  of  Composition"  and  "The 
Poetic  Principle."  Its  resources  seem  devices.  Every 
effect  seems  due  to  an  expedient.  The  repetend  and 
the  refrain  are  reliances  with  him — not  instrumental, 
but  thematic.  At  least  they  constitute  rather  than 
create  the  effect — which  has  therefore  something 
otiose  and  perfunctory  about  it. 

Technic  of  all  sorts  interested  Poe  tremendously. 
He  had  what  might  be  called  the  technical  tempera 
ment — a  variety  perhaps  more  familiar  than  widely 
recognized.  It  is  the  temperament  that  delights  in 
terminology,  labels,  little  boxes  and  drawers,  definitions, 
catalogues,  categories,  all  ingeniously,  that  is  to  say 
mechanically,  apposite  and  perfectly  rigid.  It  illus 
trates  the  passion  for  order  run  to  seed — activity  of 
mind  avoiding  the  drudgery  of  thought  by  definiteness 
of  classification.  Manner  being  more  susceptible  of 
classification  than  matter,  how  the  thing  is  done  interests 
it  more  than  the  thing  itself.  Such  a  temperament  on 
larger  lines  than  common,  with  a  certain  sweep  as  well 
as  system,  Poe  possessed.  It  rose  to  the  pitch  of  posi 
tive  genius  with  him.  He  pondered,  himself,  and 
lectured  his  contemporaries  on  how  literature  should  be 
written,  how  a  tale  should  be  presented,  how  a  poem 
should  be  built  up.  His  criticism  is  largely,  almost 
exclusively,  technical.  He  pursued  it  quite  in  the  de 
tective  spirit.  His  review  of  "Barnaby  Rudge,"  of 
which  to  Dickens 's  amazement  he  divined  the  d£noue- 
ment,  is  worthy  of  M.  Dupin  and  is  historic.  His  long 

212 


POE 

criticisms  of  Cooper  and  Hawthorne  are  craftsman's 
criticism.  And  as  such  they  are  extraordinarily  good. 
They  contrast  refreshingly  with  the  general  run  of 
literary  praise  and  blame  in  his  day — and  in  ours — in 
being  specific,  pointed  and  competent  and  avoiding 
the  vague,  the  sentimental  and  the  commonplaces  of 
moralizing,  though  of  course  they  have  none  of  the  over 
tones,  so  to  say,  of  either  culture  or  philosophic  depth 
that  enrich  criticism  as  well  as  give  it  a  creative  value. 
His  own  craftsmanship  considered  strictly  as  such  is 
excellent.  He  proceeds  with  perfect  self-possession 
and  deliberation;  and  there  is  this  to  be  said  for  his 
philosophizings  about  it,  that  at  least  they  disclosed  his 
own  method  and  show  conclusively  that  his  art  was  an 
art  of  calculation  and  not  the  spontaneous  expression 
of  a  weird  and  gruesome  genius  that  it  seems  to  so  many 
upon  whom  it  produces  its  carefully  prepared  effect. 

His  theory  of  poetry  is  stated  within  his  account  of 
the  composition  of  "The  Raven,"  which  is  as  a  whole 
probably  in  no  better  faith  than  the  anonymously  pub 
lished  editorial  reference  to  the  poem  that  accom 
panied  it  on  its  appearance.  Both  are  mystifications 
which  if  "The  Raven"  were  finer  would  tend  to  vul 
garize  it,  and  are  only  saved  by  being  possibly  derisory 
from  being  actually  as  risible  as  Mrs.  Browning  found 
the  poem  itself.  But  the  theory  advocated  and  illus 
trated  by  Poe  is  undoubtedly  as  sincere  as  his  perverse 
pursuit  of  originality  at  any  cost,  and  his  temperamental 
revolt  against  what  is  staple  and  standard,  not  to  speak 
of  what  is  classic,  would  permit.  It  is  briefly  that  poetry 

213 


AMERICAN   PROSE  MASTERS 

has  absolutely  nothing  to  do  with  truth,  (to  which  he 
had  an  intellectual  repugnance)  that  it  is  concerned 
solely  with  beauty  (which  he  does  not  define,  but  as 
sumes,  in  opposition  to  more  conventional  opinion  from 
Plato  to  Keats,  to  be  absolutely  divorced  from  truth), 
and  that  its  highest  expression  is  the  note  of  sadness — 
the  sadder  the  better.  Of  these  notions  only  the  last 
need  arrest  attention.  It  is  true  that  the  most  perfect 
beauty  has  often  the  note  of  sadness.  The  reason 
probably  resides  rather  in  its  effect  than  in  its  consti 
tution,  being  largely  the  recipient's  subjective  ap 
preciation  reacting  even  in,  or  especially  in,  the  pres 
ence  of  perfection  which  contrasts  so  bitterly  with 

" — the  heavy  and  the  weary  weight 
Of  all  this  unintelligible  world." 

But  it  is  not  true  that  this  is  always  the  case.  Who 
is  to  decide,  for  example,  between  the  "Ode  to  a 
Nightingale"  and  the  "Ode  on  Immortality"?  Poe's 
theory,  however,  and  its  elaborate  working  out,  in 
volve  the  inference  that  "The  Raven"  is  a  finer  poem 
than  either,  since  Wordsworth's  ode  is  actually  joyous, 
and  the  idea  of  "The  Raven"  on  the  other  hand  sadder 
than  anything  in  Keats's.  He  proves  it  by  a  plus  b : 
Of  all  melancholy  topics,  he  says,  death  is  the  most 
melancholy ;  it  is  most  poetical  when  it  allies  itself  with 
beauty;  "the  death  then  of  a  beautiful  woman  is  un 
questionably  the  most  poetical  topic  in  the  world." 

Any  force  his  theory  might  abstractly  be  supposed  to 
have,  assuredly  evaporates  in  his  illustrative  exposition 

214 


POE 

of  it  and  "The  Raven"  is  certainly  superior  to  either. 
But  two  things  are  made  perfectly  clear  by  such  theoriz 
ing  one,  that  the  theorist  is  primarily  not  a  poet  but 
an  artist — concerned  less  with  expression  than  with 
effect,  that  is  to  say;  and,  the  other,  that  he  is  not  a 
natural  but  an  eccentric  artist,  since  sadness  voluntary 
and  predetermined  is  artificial  and  morbid.  The  poem 
itself — undoubtedly  Poe's  star  performance — confirms 
these  inductions.  It  is  not  a  moving  poem.  It  has,  as 
Mrs.  Browning  herself  admitted,  a  certain  power,  but 
it  is  such  power  as  may  be  possessed  by  the  incurable 
dilettante  coldly  caressing  a  morbid  mood.  To  be 
moving  melancholy  must  be  temperamental.  Even  a 
mood  will  not  suffice.  Whatever  injustice  is  done  its 
real  genesis  by  Poe's  farrago  about  it,  "The  Raven"  is 
in  conception  and  execution  exceptionally  cold-blooded 
poetry.  But,  distinctly  on  the  plane  of  artifice,  it  is 
admirable  art.  Less  remarkable  as  a  pure  tour  de  force 
in  linguistic  luxuriance  than  the  extraordinary  "Bells," 
which  in  its  way  is  quite  unparalleled,  it  is  nevertheless 
a  noteworthy  technical  achievement.  Its  rhythms  and 
rhymes  are  more  than  clever  and  together  with  the  re 
current  accent  of  the  refrain — already  used  by  Lowell — 
combine  in  the  production  of  a  sustained  tone  and 
effect  of  totality,  which  may  almost  be  said  to  epito 
mize  Poe's  genius. 

Both  "The  Raven"  and  "The  Bells"  have  enjoyed 
an  enormous  popularity  among  readers  impressionable 
by  effects  and  insensitive  to  distinctions,  and  their  poetic 
strain  has  not  saved  them  from  being  the  natural  prey 

215 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

of  the  professional  elocutionist — also  an  elaborate 
technician  in  his  more  or  less  humble  fashion,  Poe's 
more  personal  verse  has  less  interest.  Some  of  it  de 
serves  Stoddard's  verdict  of  "doggerel,"  for  where  his 
own  work,  verse  or  prose,  was  concerned  he  had  no 
standard.  The  lines  "For  Helen"  written  when  he 
was  a  boy  are  not  only  astonishingly  precocious  but 
charming,  far  better  than  those  "For  Annie"  written 
when  he  had  matured  and  for  the  most  part  overlaid 
his  inspiration  with  artistry  and  encrusted  it  with 
technic.  The  idea  and  inspiration  of  "The  Haunted 
Palace,"  however,  amply  sustain  the  happy  technical 
art  that  expresses  them  with  not  only  admirable  musical 
aptness,  but  with  a  beautiful  fusion  of  restraint  born  of 
taste  and  ease  springing  from  fulness  that  makes  it  an 
indisputable  masterpiece.  Its  reserve,  indeed,  secures 
an  objectivity  that  is  exceptional  in  Poe  and,  since 
his  art  was  fundamentally  more  genuine  than  his  in 
spiration,  exceptionally  moving.  For  once  he  got  him 
self  out  of  the  way  and  let  his  genius  guide  him  to 
complete  success.  "The  Conqueror  Worm"  is  less  suc 
cessful,  I  think,  in  being  more  a  tour  de  force.  It  shares 
a  little  the  "staginess"  of  the  donnee  and  his  taste 
shows  its  fickleness  by  deserting  him,  though  it  is 
certainly  a  spirited  piece  of  voulu  pessimism  and — no 
slight  praise — the  last  two  lines  are  among  the  classics 
of  the  "catching."  On  the  other  hand  in  "Ulalume" 
one  feels  the  sincerity  latent  in  the  most  artificial  and 
abnormal  natures — though  a  sincerity  that  throws  into 
sharper  relief  than  usual  the  element  of  artifice  in 

216 


POE 

Poe's  art  and  seems  itself  in  the  shadow  that  per 
haps  befits  remorse,  behind  the  apparatus  of  repe- 
tend  and  empty  assonance  that  tries  the  reader's 
nerves.  Even  here  one  feels  the  aptness  of  Emerson's 
bland  reference  to  him  (in  conversation  with  Mr.  How- 
ells)  as  the  "  jingle  man,"  and  notes  the  artist  rather  than 
the  poet  and  the  technician  rather  than  the  artist.  In 
any  case  the  volume  of  his  verse  is  so  slight  as  to  confine 
his  claim  to  its  quality,  and  its  quality  is,  in  general, 
hardly  such  as  to  place  him  very  high  up  on  the  fairly 
populous  slopes  of  Parnassus  where  there  is  more 
competition  than  he  met  with  in  his  lifetime.-  Compe 
tition  is  fatal  to  Poe.  His  cue  was  distinctly  to  function 
outside  of  it,  and  he  was  wise  to  cultivate  originality  at 
any  price. 

Ill 

As  a  technician  his  most  noteworthy  success  is  the 
/-completeness  of  his  effect.  He  understood  to  perfection 
the  value  of  tone  in  a  composition,  and  tone  is  an  ele 
ment  that  is  almost  invaluable.  In  this  respect  he  has 
no  American  and  few  foreign  rivals.  All  of  his  writings 
attest  his  supreme  comprehension  of  it — prose  as  well 
as  poetry,  the  ablest  and  the  most  abject.  Such  rub 
bish  as  "The  Due  de  POmelette"  with  its  galvanic 
rictus  of  false  but  sustained  gaiety;  such  elaborate  and 
hollow  solemnity  as  the  parable  "Shadow,"  which  ends, 
however,  on  a  note  of  real  pith  and  dignity;  such  a 
crazy-quilt  of  tinsel  as  "The  Assignation,"  all  have  this 
unifying  quality  which  makes  art  of  them.  His  very 

217 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

deficiency  in  the  qualities  usually  present  in  the  ro 
mance-writer  and  absolutely  vital  in  romance  of  a  high 
order,  enabled  him  to  cultivate  his  own  special  excel 
lences  the  more  exclusively.  Many  of  the  tales  are 
tone  and  nothing  else — not  even  tone  of  any  particular 
character  but  a  reticulation  of  relations  merely  in 
admirable  unison.  The  false  note  is  the  one  falsity  he 
eschewed.  Tinkling  feet  on  a  tufted  carpet  is  nonsense, 
but  it  is  not  a  false  note  in  the  verbal  harmony  of  the 
artificial  " Raven."  In  "The  Cask  of  Amontillado" 
the  tone  is  like  the  click  of  malignant  castanets.  And 
in  "The  Fall  of  the  House  of  Usher"  it  reaches  Poe's 
N  climax  of  power — a  diapason  of  gloom,  wholly  voluntary, 
nd  ending  none  too  soon  perhaps,  but  maintained  to 
y  the  end  with  the  success  of  a  veritable  tour  de  force. 
What  on  the  other  hand  he  did  not  understand  was 
modulation.  He  has  no  variety.  Probably  he  realized 
this  limitation  and  confined  himself  almost  wholly  in 
prose  to  the  short  story,  grotesquely  prescribing,  too, 
one  hundred  lines  as  the  limit  of  a  poem.  A  novel 
by  Poe  is  inconceivable,  and  would  be  even  if  he  had 
had  the  feeling  for  character  and  the  human  interest 
that  the  novel  demands.  This  is  partly  because  he 
lacked  sustained  power,  and  the  larger  art  of  organiza 
tion  and  dynamic  development,  but  it  is  also  due  to  the 
monotony  that  results  probably  from  the  predomi 
nance  and  prolongation  of  the  mood,  which  makes  it  so 
easy  for  him  to  secure  tone. 

Thus  he  achieves   atmosphere  but  an   atmosphere 
which  is  less  the  envelope  than  the  content  of  his  work, 

218 


POE 

and  which  so  enwraps  the  detail  as  to  blend  its  ac 
cents  and  minimize  the  force  of  such  variety  as  it  has. 
Nothing  takes  place  in  "The  Fall  of  the  House  of 
Usher"  that  is  not  trivial  and  inconclusive  compared 
with  its  successful  monotone,  its  atmosphere  of  lurid 
murk  and  disintegrating  gloom.  And  as  a  consequence 
of  this  inversion  of  the  normal  artistic  relations  of  con 
tent  and  envelope  I  must  say  I  think  that  even  here, 
where  we  have  Poe  at  his  best,  he  refuses  us  all  satis 
faction  that  lies  beyond  the  scope  of  purely  scenic  art. 
In  this  one  respect "  The  Cask  of  Amontillado  "  is  better. 
It,  too,  is  most  remarkable  artistically  for  its  tone,  the 
cascade  of  brilliant  chatter  that  sustains  its  suspense. 
But  it  contains  some  psychology,  devilish  rather  than 
human,  to  be  sure,  and  therefore  as  usual  ringing  false, 
yet  imaginatively  thrilling  in  its  malignity,  though  its 
rnonstrousness  is  rendered  somewhat  insipid  by  the 
perversity  and  characteristic  inadequacy  of  its  motive. 
And  it  has  a  situation  both  moral  and  material  and  a 
rapidly  conducted,  however  meagre,  action.  But  even 
these  two  tales  as  they  stand  do  not  take  their  author 
out  of  the  rank  of  the  purely  scenic  artist,  compara 
tively  high  as  they  may  place  him  within  it.  The 
truth  is  that  no  writer  of  anything  approaching  Poe's 
ability  has  b^"  nnntenUo  remain  in  this  rank. 

There  is  unquestionable  power  in  his  best  tales,  but 
it  is  a  repellent  power.  Its  manifestations  are  either 
unsympathetic  or  repulsive — unsympathetic  where  suc 
cessful  because  they  make  their  effect  by  attacking 
instead  of  charming  the  sensibilities,  repulsive  where 

219 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

they  fail  because  nothing  but  success  can  excuse  such 
sinister  assault.  The  complaisant  mental  attitude  of 
the  reader  who  co-operates  with  a  writer  so  systemati 
cally  bent  on  his  conquest  instead  of  on  his  captivation 
is  singularly  innocent.  And  I  do  not  think  the  experi 
enced  share  it.  Mainly,  I  imagine,  Foe's  stories  are 
read  in  youth  and  rarely  returned  to — except  by  patriotic 
critics  of  a  tendency  to  dithyramb,  and  too  solicitous 
to  magnify  the  salient  figures  of  our  literature  to  recon 
sider  their  own  early  evaluations.  A  mature  judgment 
must  discern,  and  a  mature  susceptibility  resent,  the 
writer's  manifest  motive.  In  fact  his  most  character 
istic  limitation  as  an  artist  is  the  limited  character  of 
the  pleasure  he  gives.  He  has  a  perverse  instinct  for 
restricting  it  to  that  produced  by  pain.  Pain  and 
pleasure  have  no  doubt  an  equivalent  aesthetic  sanction. 
Metaphysically  they  are  sometimes,  indeed,  difficult  to 
distinguish;  desire,  for  example,  which  superficially 
classes  itself  as  pleasure  being  probably  pain  in  reality. 
The  discussion  of  such  a  question  would  have  delighted 
Poe;  but  it  is  unnecessary  to  quarrel  with  the  legiti 
macy  of  painful  effects  in  art — in  which  as  in  life 
no  doubt,  as  Mrs.  Browning  declared,  "pain  is  not 
the  fruit  of  pain" — in  order  to  appreciate  the  per 
versity  of  Poe's  practice  in  this  regard.  The  pro 
duction  of  pain  is  with  him  an  end,  not  a  means  to  the 
production  of  pleasure.  His  design  is,  crassly,  to  wring 
the  withers  of  our  sensoriums.  Such  a  design  is  the 
delight  of  the  degenerate.  Decadents,  such  as  Baude 
laire,  discern  it  readily  and  naturally — or  unnaturally, 

220 


POE 

as  one  chooses — savor  it  and  enjoy  to  the  full  "the 
generous  pleasure  of  praising"  it.  The  naive  and 
hearty  and  good  natured  and  uncritical  with  a  weakness 
for  the  romantic  at  any  price,  such  as  Gautier,  fail  to 
note  it  and  admire  its  results  as  revolutionary  simply. 
Doubtless  Poe  did  not  himself  realize  this  perversity  in 
its  fulness.  Doubtless  nothing  would  have  surprised 
him  more,  and  more  evoked  his  scorn,  than  the  assertion 
that  such  a  foe  to  philistinism  as  himself  lacked  ideality. 
He  had  ideality  but  it  was  exclusively  artistic.  It  was 
entirely  consistent  with  unscrupulousness.  No  doubt 
the  most  loathsome  subjects  are  susceptible  of  artistic 
treatment  and  may  serve  the  ends  of  beauty.  But  a 
preference  for  them  in  the  artist  raises  a  presumption 
against  his  competence  in  the  circumstances — a  pre 
sumption  amply  justified  in  Poe's  case.  Not  what 
soever  things  are  lovely  and  of  good  report,  but  what 
soever  things  are  effective  were  his  preoccupation.  _In- 
tensity  of  effect  was  accordingly  his.  end,  and  artifice  his 
means?  And"  fine  things  are  not  thus^produceHT~~The 
law  of  the  universe  in  virtue  of  which  the  beautiful,  the 
true,  and  the  good  are  inextricably  interrelated  forbids 
it.  Matthew  Arnold  maintained  that  it  was  "lost 
labor"  to  inquire  into  a  writer's  motive.  Undoubtedly 
errors  have  been  made  by  allowing  the  real  or  supposed 
springs  of  a  writer's  production  to  color  one's  apprecia 
tion  of  them.  Thackeray's  view  of  Sterne,  for  example, 
is  rather  summary.  But  with  Poe  the  case  is  different. 
The  only  reason  for  its  being  lost  labor  to  inquire  into 
his  motive  is  the  fact  that  his  motive  is  in  plain  sight. 

221 


/ 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

And  to  neglect  it  would  be  to  neglect  what  not  only 
colors,  but  is  the  constituent  element  of  a  large  portion 
— a  large  proportion  indeed — of  his  writings. 

In  the  most  characteristic  this  motive  is  exactly  that 
„«!     of  the  fat  boy  in  "Pickwick"  who  announced  to  his 
r        easily  thrilled  auditors  that  he  was  going  to  make  their 
flesh  creep.     To  accomplish  this  result,  however,  is 
more  difficult  than  to  announce  it,  unless  one  deals  with 
an  altogether  higher  order  of  material  than  Poe's,  and 
is  possessed  of  an  altogether  different  order  of  powers. 
The  element  of  awe  is  not,  of  course,  in  question,  and 
there  is  no  need  to  cite  more  august  examples  than  that 
r  of  Victor  Hugo,  for  instance,  to  remind  ourselves  by 

contrast  of  the  difference  between  the  flesh-creeping 
effects  produced  by  a  master  and  those  obtained  by 
a  charlatan  who  addresses  not  in  the  least  the  mind,  but 
exclusively  the  nerves.  In  fact  the  comparison  of  any 
great  writer  to  Poe,  it  may  be  incidentally  remarked, 
results  in  the  sense  of  contrast,  and  would  undoubtedly 
instinctively  be  called  unfair  by  his  admirers,  many  of 
whom  "do  not,"  as  the  phrase  is,  "know  very  well 
what  they  want."  His  success  in  accomplishing  his 
desired  effect  at  all  events  is  fatally  compromised, 
usually,  in  two  ways:  his  motive  is  too  plain  and  his 
means  are  too  primitive.  He  makes  his  motive  so 
plain,  not  only  by  its  constant  undisguised  and  obvious 
recurrence,  but  by  actual  profession  (see  "The  Phi 
losophy  of  Composition"  and  "The  Poetic  Principle," 
for  example)  as  to  defeat  its  own  end.  It  is  impossi 
ble  to  meet  halfway  an  artist  whose  efforts  to  sur- 

222 


POE 

prise,  shock,  startle  you  are  all  the  while  in  full  sight. 
He  must  perforce  forego  the  unconscious  reciprocity 
of  concern  that  is  the  essence  of  appreciation.  A 
writer  who  declares  at  every  turn,  as  the  inveteracy  of 
Poe's  practice,  his  constant  harping  on  the  string  of 
"horror,"  declares,  that  he  is  "going  to  make  your 
flesh  creep "  can  hardly  succeed  in  doing  so.  In  the 
face  of  such  an  announcement  any  flesh  at  all  jaded  by 
the  extravagances  of  romanticism  remains  stationary. 
In  the  case  of  some  of  Foe's  stories,  in  fact,  positive 
paralysis  ensues  in  the  face  of  almost  hysterical  efforts 
on  his  part  at  galvanism;  "The  Pest"  for  instance. 
For  this  carnomaniac  purpose,  too,  his  means  are  as 
primitive  as  his  motive  is  plain.  He  can  certainly  pro 
duce  his  effect  when  the  material  he  treats  is  of  a  nature 
to  produce  it  in  anyone's  hands.  The  subject  itself  of 
"The  Premature  Burial"  is  full  of  horror,  and  can  be 
trusted  to  come  home  to  the  imagination  of  the  reader 
under  any  treatment  of  it.  So  with  the  idea  of  being 
walled  up  alive  as  presented  in  "The  Cask  of  Amon 
tillado."  So  also  with  the  situation  in  "The  Pit  and 
The  Pendulum."  But  in  most  instances  it  may  cer 
tainly  be  said  that  one  does  not  get  enough  pain  out  Q£ 
Poe  to  receive  any  great  amount  of  pleasure  from  him.  \ 
He  carries  his  "  unscrupulousness  "  very  far  indeed— J[ 
much  farther  than  even  in  Arnold's  estimation  King- 
lake  could  be  said  to!  In  fact,  if  throughout  his  work 
you  feel  the  artist,  you  also  feel  the  artistic  liar.  He  is 
the  avatar  of  the  type— a  type  tolerably  well  known  in 
a  multitude  of  examples  from  Mandeville  to  Miin- 

223 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

chausen  and  establishing  perhaps  through  its  mere 
existence,  if  anything  could,  the  absence  of  any  neces 
sary  connection  between  art  and  truth.  Truth  stood 
between  him  and  originality.  It  irked  him  equally  in 
pursuing  the  egregious,  in  which  he  delighted,  and  in 
eluding  the  commonplace,  which  he  abhorred.  The 
esoteric  attracted,  and  the  ecumenical  repelled  him. 
He  was  fascinated  by  the  false  as  Hawthorne  was  by 
the  fanciful.  He  was,  as  Henri  Martin  said  of  the 
Celt,  "always  in  revolt  against  the  despotism  of  fact." 
He  was  an  artist  in  whom  the  great  purpose  of  art, 
making  the  unreal  appear  real,  became  the  end  of 
making  the  false  _appsar  true.  At  this  flagitious  game 
he  evinced  the  superior  cleverness  of  the  children  of 
this  world.  Nowhere  is  his  skill  more  noteworthy  than 
in  securing  verisimilitude  for  the  improbable,  the  in 
credible,  one  of  the  most  obvious  of  his  expedients 
being  the  auto-biographical  form,  for  which  he  shows 
the  notorious  partiality  of  the  so-called  habitual  liar.  I 
have  not  made  the  calculation,  but  I  should  think  there 
were  not  a  half  dozen  of  his  sixty-eight  tales  in  which 
this  form  is  not  employed,  and  these  are  not  among 
his  comparatively  few  successes;  when  the  material  is 
extraordinary  this  personal  presentation  of  it  gives  it 
great  plausibility  in  the  esteem  of  the  credulous,  though 
it  is  to  be  said  that  it  arouses  a  corresponding  distrust 
in  the  sceptical.  The  same  fondness  for  the  false  ap 
pears  in  his  occasional  inversion  of  the  process,  whereby 
the  truth  is  made  to  seem  incredible — marvellous  be 
yond  belief,  "too  good  to  be  true,"  in  a  word,  but  true 

224 


POE 

all  the  same.  Here  of  course  the  falsity  of  effect, 
merely  takes  the  place  of  falsity  of  material.  It  was 
all  one  to  Poe,  provided  he  satisfied  his  passion  for 
mystification.  The  shortest  road  to  producing  the 
sensational  effect  that  alone  he  sought  is  to  contro 
vert  the  established  order  and  for  that  road  apart  from 
its  being  the  line  of  least  resistance  he  had  a  native 
affinity.  The. key-note  indeed  of  his  nature  is  revolt. 

In  instinctive  recalcitrancy  to  the  general  constitu 
tion  of  things  he  passed  his  life  in  kicking  against  its 
pricks  and  produced  his  literature  in  the  process. 
Inevitably  the  false,  the  ugly  and  the  wrong  attracted 
him,  since  the  established  standard  is  of  the  good, 
the  beautiful  and  the  true.  But  as  the  established 
is  the  only  conceivable  standard  he  was  naturally 
forced  to  treat  the  former  trinity  in  conjunction  with, 
if  not  in  terms  of,  the  latter.  The  effect  he  aimed  at 
being  exclusively  a  sensational  effect,  he  could  best  se 
cure  it  by  falsifying  his  material,  and  thus  circumvent 
ing  the  reader's  tranquillity  of  expectation.  The  fact 
that  such  sensation  is  valueless  was  of  no  concern  to  a 
philosopher  who  attached  value  to  sensation  as  such 
and  to  sensation  only.  Hence  he  devoted  the  powers 
of  an  extraordinary  intellect  to  producing  what  is  to 
the  intellect  of  next  to  no  interest.  The  abnormal,  in 
its  various  manifestations,  the  sinister,  the  diseased,  the 
deflected,  even  the  disgusting  were  his  natural  theme. 
He  could  not  conceive  the  normal  save  as  the  common 
place  for  which  he  had  apparently  the  "horror"  he 
would  have  liked  to  inspire  in  others  by  the  presentation 

225 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

of  the  eccentric.  Dread  of  the  commonplace,  as  was 
pointed  out  centuries  ago  by  a  far  otherwise  penetrating 
critic  than  Poe,  is  fatal  to  the  sublime.  And  there  is 
assuredly  no  sublimity  in  Poe. 

Yet  the  tales  of  horror  and  those  of  the  weird  and  the 
fantastic  probably  stand  in  the  widest  popular  estimate 
as  especially  characteristic.  And  it  is  true  that  it  is 
of  these  one  thinks  when  one  speaks  of  a  Poe  story. 
They  have,  many  of  them,  the  evil  eminence  that  wilful 
morbidity  lends  to  the  production  of  its  votaries  of 
genius,  and  except  for  the  effect  on  the  nerves  which  a 
few  of  them  are  able  to  produce  on  "suggestible"  sen- 
soriums,  they  hold  their  place  among  other  writings  of 
a  similar  sort — there  are  none  precisely  like  them,  be 
cause  of  their  meagreness — chiefly  on  account  of  their 
scenic  quality.  More  has  been  claimed  for  the  "tales 
of  ratiocination"  as  they  are  called.  Writers  before 
Poe  have  "grovelled  in  the  ghastly  and  wallowed  in  the 
weird  "  with  considerable  effect  if  with  an  art  inferior  to 
his.  But  he  has  been  called  the  inventor  of  the  de 
tective  story,  and  thus  decorated  with  a  badge  of  unique 
distinction  in  the  hierarchy  of  literature.  It  is  always 
difficult  to  assign  with  certainty  to  any  individual  the 
invention  of  a  literary  or  plastic  genre.  "Doubtless 
Homer  had  his  Homer,"  remarks  Thoreau.  M.  Dupin 
was  certainly  preceded  by  Zadig,  and  Voltaire  is  said 
to  have  invented  "Zadig"  after  reading  an  Oriental 
prototype.  And  even  ascribing  to  Poe  the  invention 
of  the  detective  story,  the  lover  of  literature  may  justly 
exclaim,  "la  belle  affaire!"  and  feel  disposed  rather  to 

226 


POE 

charge  than  to  credit  him  with  it.  However,  to  start 
or  even  accelerate  a  literary  current  of  magnitude,  what 
ever  its  merit,  is  an  accomplishment  so  rare  as  to  be 
noteworthy  on  that  account  alone.  And  though  it  is, 
no  doubt,  the  detective  story  that  is  most  indebted  to 
him  in  this  respect,  it  is  by  no  means  the  only  fruit  of 
his  remarkable  inventiveness.  "No  man,"  says  a 
writer  in  the  London  Spectator,  "struck  out  so  many 
new  lines  in  the  region  of  romance,"  and  he  proceeds 
to  derive  Jules  Verne's  stories  from  "Hans  Pfall," 
"She"  from  "A.  Gordon  Pym,"  "Treasure  Island" 
from  "The  Gold  Bug,"  "Dr.  Jekyll  and  Mr.  Hyde" 
from  "William  Wilson,"  Zola's,  Flaubert's  and  even 
Mr.  H.  G.  Wells's  realism  from  Foe's  minute  detail,  etc. 
This  does  not  of  course  modify  his  own  conclusion  that 
"  it  is  an  inhuman  and  perverse  judgment  that  finds  in 
Poe  the  springs  of  truly  great  writing;"  and  it  should 
also  be  pointed  out  that  there  is  a  considerable  element 
of  fancifulness — the  fancifulness  of  the  literal — in  such 
romantic  etymology.  It  is  quite  conceivable  that  neither 
Jules  Verne  nor  Stevenson,  nor  Mr.  Rider  Haggard 
nor  any  of  the  other  writers  in  question  was  conscious  of 
any  specific  or  general  indebtedness  to  Poe,  whom  also 
in  the  different  genres  in  question,  save  perhaps  that  of 
"The  Gold  Bug,"  they  one  and  all  altogether  surpassed. 
Mr.  Wells,  for  example,  might  excusably  prefer  to  de 
rive  his  mystification  from  the  minute  detail  of  Swift. 
Nevertheless,  such  analogies  are  eloquent  witness  of 
Poe's  inventive  genius — characterize,  in  fact,  his  genius 
as  inventive  rather  than  imaginative. 

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AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

For  that  reason  he  seems  to  me,  as  I  began  by  saying, 
more  personal  than  truly  original  in  the  higher  literary 
sense,  since,  though  he  was  extremely  idiosyncratic, 
nevertheless  what  he  originated  lay  definitely  in  the 
sphere  of  invention.  His  imaginative  writing  is  far 
less  original.  Having  the  imaginative  in  mind  we  may 
say  that  originality  consists  in  taking  a  fresh  view, 
originating  a  new  conspectus,  a  new  synthesis,  of  life 
and  the  world — turning  objective  material  around  a 
little  and  exhibiting  it  with  a  different  silhouette.  It 
is  in  this  way  that  real  contributions  to  literature  are 
made,  and  it  is  thus  that  the  really  great  writer  serves 
literature  as  the  savant  advances  science.  There  is 
nothing  of  this  kind  to  be  looked  for  in  Poe.  The  true 
material  of  literature  he  left  precisely  where  he  found 
it,  for  all  his  fantastic  stirring  of  it  and  uneasy  striving 
with  it.  On  the  lower  plane  of  invention,  his  mechan 
ical  and  mathematical  turn,  his  fecundity  in  ideas,  con 
ceptions,  experimental  notions  certainly  devised  new 
modes,  new  fashions  as  it  were,  in  fiction — which, 
indeed,  was  precisely  what  he  himself  understood  by 
the  originality  he  pursued  and  declared  universally  at 
tainable.  And  in  this  field  "ratiocination"  is  distinctly 
his  forte.  Here  he  excelled  if  he  did  not,  narrowly 
speaking,  invent;  or  rather,  broadly  speaking,  excelled  as 
well  as  invented.  In  this  respect  "The  Gold  Bug"  is 
probably  an  unsurpassed  masterpiece;  a  masterpiece, 
at  any  rate — which  is  no  doubt  eulogy  enough,  though 
M.  Lemaitre's  characterization  of  Maupassant  as  "a 
peu  pres  irre*prochable  dans  un  genre  qui  ne  Test  pas," 

228 


POE 

is  certainly  applicable  to  it.  So  in  a  less  degree  is  "The 
Murders  in  the  Rue  Morgue. "  "  The  Purloined  Letter" 
is  decidedly  inferior  and  "The  Mystery  of  Marie 
Roget"  quite  unworthy  the  inventor  of  the  detective 
story.  In  "The  Purloined  Letter"  the  effect  of  M. 
Dupin's  con  temp  tuousn  ess  dominates  that  of  his  skill, 
and  in  "The  Mystery  of  Marie  Rog£t"  the  arrogance 
of  the  author  is  destructive  of  all  interest  in  a  tale  that  is 
also  otherwise  tedious.  When  Poe's  personality  comes 
to  the  surface  the  effect  is  always  unpleasant,  and  it  is 
the  absence  of  temperamental  color  that  gives  an 
agreeable  relief  to  such  exhibitions  of  his  purely  intel 
lectual  activity  as  "The  Gold  Bug"  and  "The  Murders 
in  the  Rue  Morgue;"  just  as  among  his  weird  and  fan 
tastic  tales  the  best  are  those  in  which  there  are  the 
most  evidences  of  his  art  and  the  fewest  of  his  disposi 
tion. 

However,  the  extraordinary  disproportion  of  inferior 
work  in  his  prose  does  not  obscure  the  fact  that  he  was 
essentially  an  artist.  The  fact  that  there  are  hardly  a 
dozen  good  ones  among  his  sixty-eight  tales  is  not  due 
to  any  deflection  of  his  artistic  attitude.  He  had  no 
other  attitude — save  that  of  necessity  involved  in  his 
contentious  exposition  of  artistic  principles  and  his 
temperamental  reprobation  of  practitioners  of  a  dif 
ferent  turn.  Polemically  he  certainly  shows  little  of  the 
detachment  so  often  prescribed  to  the  artist.  But  even 
in  polemic  whenever  he  is  in  the  least  impersonal  and 
disinterested  it  is  the  artistic  for  which  he  is  contending. 
He  is  not  averse  to  "abusing  the  plaintiff's  attorney," 

229 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

but  the  plaintiff's  case  he  attacks  on  artistic  grounds. 
Even  in  his  poorer  work,  even  in  his  poorest,  the  work 
manship  is  always  the  best  element.  It  is  poor  enough 
in  some  of  it,  but  in  such  tales  as  "Four  Beasts  in 
One,"  "Loss  of  Breath,"  "The  Man  that  was  Used 
Up,"  "Never  Bet  the  Devil  Your  Head,"  in  fact  al 
most  all  the  "tales  of  extravaganza  and  caprice,"  there 
is  assuredly  nothing  else.  In  such  inexplicable  "ex 
travaganzas"  as  "The  Due  de  POmelette"  and  "Lion 
izing"  its  stark  salience  gets  on  one's  nerves.  The  ex 
cessive  predominance  of  this  kind  of  thing  in  his  tales 
is  due  obviously  to  failure  in  inspiration.  But  more 
obscurely  it  is  undoubtedly  due  to  alcohol.  "Bon- 
Bon,"  for  example,  seems  definitely  characteristic  of 
inebriety.  The  effect  of  alcohol  is  well  known  to  be  the 
relief  of  that  tension  which  the  maintenance  of  equilib 
rium  imposes  so  painfully  on  such  organizations  as 
Poe's,  and  a  consequence  of  excessive  indulgence  in  it  is 
therefore  the  loss  of  that  balance  of  the  faculties  which 
secures  correct  judgments.  It  is  impossible  to  account 
for  much  of  Poe's  writing  except  on  the  theory  that  both 
in  conception  and  in  execution  it  was  in  this  way 
transfigured  to  his  mind  and  sense.  He  saw  it  through 
the  mist  of  mental  congestion  and  saw  in  its  incoher 
ence  the  significance  that  escapes  sobriety.  Even  his 
egotism  would  be  insufficient  otherwise  to  explain  it. 
The  effects  of  opium  in  stimulating  and  coloring  the 
poetic  imagination — as  in  Coleridge's  case — are  familiar. 
But  those  of  alcohol  are  pathologically  quite  different 
and  quite  inferior,  and  it  does  not  seem  to  have  been 

230 


POE 

sufficiently  remarked  that  in  Poe's  case  they  were  un 
doubtedly  responsible  for  the  deterioration  of  his 
literary  productions  as  well  as  for  the  pathetic  dis 
integration  of  his  life.  It  is  a  generous  instinct  that 
shrinks  from  dwelling  on  the  latter,  but  the  naivete* 
that  ignores  the  obvious  origin  of  much  of  his  tl  extrava 
ganza  and  caprice"  is  less  generous  than  blind — and 
above  all  slightly  ridiculous.  The  explanation  at  all 
events  seems  to  reduce  ad  dbsurdum  the  sanction  of 
being  "thrilled"  for  the  "thrill's"  sake. 

IV 

The  truth  is  it  is  idle  to  endeavor  to  make  a  great 
writer  of  Poe  because  whatever  his  merits  as  a  literary 
artist  his  writings  lack  the  elements  not  only  of  great, 
but  of  real,  literature.  They  lack  substance.  Litera 
ture  is  more  than  an  art.  It  is  art  in  an  extended  sense 
of  the  term.  Since  it  is  the  art  that  deals  with  life 
rather  than  with  appearances  it  is  the  art  par  excel 
lence  that  is  art  plus  something  else — plus  substance. 
Its  interest  is  immensely  narrowed  when  it  can  only 
be  considered  plastically — narrowed  to  the  point  of 
inanity,  of  insignificance.  Poe  was  certainly  an  artist, 
but  the  fact  that  he  was  exclusively  an  artist  and  an 
artist  in  an  extremely  restricted  sense,  of  itself  mini 
mizes  the  literature  he  produced.  Shakespeare,  for 
example,  is  neither  exclusively  nor  supremely  an 
artist.  M.  Jules  Lemaitre  informs  us  how  much  better 
in  some  respects — in  artistic  respects — Racine  would 

231 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

have  written  "Hamlet."  Every  art  of  course,  has  its 
conventions.  It  rearranges  them  from  time  to  time, 
it  is  subject  to  the  law  of  evolution,  but  it  depends  on 
them  always.  And  in  so  far  as  literature  is  an  art  it, 
too,  leans  upon  them.  It  has  its  schools,  its  phases, 
its  successive  points  of  view,  its  academic  perfections,  its 
solecisms.  But  the  fact  that  it  deals  with  life  itself 
rather  than  exclusively  with  appearances — which  may 
be  arranged,  organized,  systematized,  controlled  far 
more  easily  through  their  greater  preliminary  simplifi 
cation — gives  it  so  much  more  range,  so  much  greater 
freedom,  such  an  infinitely  greater  miscellaneity  of  mate 
rial  of  so  much  more  significance  and  vitality,  that  it 
is  comparatively  independent  of  conventions,  and 
finds  its  supreme  justification  in  giving  anyhow,  in 
any  way,  well  or  ill  one  may  almost  say,  the  effect  of 
life,  the  phenomena  and  significance  of  life  which  con 
stitute  its  substance.  Thus  it  is  that  in  literature  sub 
stance  counts  so  much  more  than  it  counts  in  any  other 
art,  however  much  any  other  may  also  be  in  its  degree 
"a  criticism  of  life."  Mr.  Henry  James  has  curiously 
illustrated  the  principle  in  later  years.  Beginning  as 
pre-eminently  or  at  least  conspicuously  an  artist  he  has 
become  so  overwhelmed  by  the  prodigious  wealth 
and  miscellaneity  of  his  material — that  is  to  say,  the 
phases  of  life  which  his  prodigious  penetration  has  re 
vealed  to  him — that  his  art  has  been  submerged  by  it. 
The  trees  have  obliterated  the  forest.  All  the  more 
important  is  it,  one  may  argue,  to  cling  to  conventions 
of  treatment,  that  your  picture  of  life  may  be  definite, 

232 


POE 

coherent  and  effective.  Yes,  but  one  of  these  con 
ventions  is  a  certain  correspondence  with  reality.  Life 
being  the  subject  of  literature  more  fully  and  directly 
than  it  is  of  any  purely  plastic  art  that  deals  with  ap 
pearances — which  are  necessarily  more  ordered  and 
adaptable  and  in  a  sense  art  themselves,  or  a  stage  of 
it — being  indeed  the  substance  as  well  as  the  subject 
of  literature,  this  correspondence  with  reality  is  exacted 
by  it  of  any  treatment  of  it  that  is,  even  as  art,  to  have 
any  interest  or  value.  The  doctrine  of  art  for  art's 
sake  applied  to  literature  is  apt  to  have  particularly 
insipid  results. 

In  short,  however  extravagant  and  capricious,  any 
work  of  art  is  necessarily  subject  to  its  material  and  the 
hand  of  every  artist  must  like  the  dyer's  be  subdued  to 
what  it  works  in.  But  a  literary  composition,  espe 
cially,  cannot  be  conceived  and  executed  in  vacuo. 
The  warp  must  be  "given",  however  wholly  the  woof 
may  be  invented,  or  the  web  will  be  insubstantial  and 
the  pattern  incoherent.  Poe  could  transact  his  imagin 
ings  in  environments  of  the  purest  fancy,  in  no-man's 
land,  in  the  country  of  nowhere,  and  fill  these  with 
"tarns"  and  morasses  and  "ragged  mountains"  and 
shrieking  water-lilies,  flood  them  with  ghastly  moon 
light  and  aerate  them  with  "rank  miasmas."  Never 
theless,  he  could  only  avoid  the  flatness  of  pure  phantas 
magoria  by  peopling  them  with  humanity.  His  land 
scape  might  embody  extravagance  and  his  atmosphere 
enshroud  caprice,  his  figures  demanded  to  be  made 
human.  The  overwhelming  interest  of  fiction  is  its 

233 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

human  interest.  Since  it  is  peopled  with  human 
figures  neglect  of  its  population  is  a  contradiction  in 
terms.  Even  in  the  fiction  of  adventure,  in  which  the 
personages  are  minimized  and  the  incidents  the  main 
concern,  even  in  fiction  in  which  plot  figures  as  the 
protagonist  of  the  drama,  plot  and  incident  would  be 
sterile  but  for  the  characters  that  figure  in  them.  How 
ever  subordinate  and  undifferentiated  these  may  be, 
they  must  make  some  intrinsic  appeal,  or  we  should  not 
care  what  happened  to  them.  The  game  even  as  a 
game  is  not  one  that  can  be  played  with  counters.  Yet, 
that  is  precisely  the  way  in  which  Poe  played  it.  And 
his  stories  have  no  human  interest  because  humanity 
did  not  in  the  least  interest  him.  Neither  man  nor 
woman  delighted  him  enough  to  occupy  his  genius 
even  incidentally.  His  tales  contain,  of  course,  no 
"  character " — that  prime  essential,  and  most  exacting 
raison-d'etre  of  normal  fiction.  But  what  is  surprising 
is  the  absolute  inhumanity  of  the  personages  he  is  com 
pelled  to  incarnate  and  the  absolutely  inhuman  way  in 
which  he  sets  them  forth.  In  almost  every  case  of 
importance,  as  I  have  said,  the  chief  personage  is  the 
narrator  and — perhaps  a  little  from  this  substantially 
unvaried  practice,  though  mainly,  I  think,  because  of 
the  real  resemblance — the  narrator  suggests  Poe  him 
self.  Each  is  very  baldly  the  centre  of  his  universe. 
The  two  take  pretty  much  the  same  view — an  astonish 
ingly  external  one  so  far  as  human  nature  is  concerned. 
The  illusion  of  the  story  is  subserved,  but  of  the  story 
quite  apart  from  the  personages.  What  it  gains  in 

234 


POE 

illusion,  it  loses  in  significance.  Indeed,  so  great  is  the 
importance  of  human  character  to  a  story  that  deals  with 
it  at  all  that  I  think  those  of  Poe's  tales  in  which  the 
personages  are  the  least  shadowy,  the  least  like  alge 
braic  symbols,  the  least  characteristic,  that  is  to  say, 
are  greatly  helped  by  the  fact.  The  stories  in  which  he 
figures  gain  greatly  from  M.  Dupin,  who  has  a  pedantic 
and  censorious  temperament,  though  his  differentiation 
is  as  inferior  to  that  of  his  successor,  M.  Lecocq,  as  the 
meagre  and  mathematical  medium  in  which  he  exists 
is  to  the  varied  and  entertaining  field  of  activity,  full 
of  character  and  crowded  with  incident,  that  Gaboriau 
furnished  for  the  latter— without,  however,  reaching 
eminence  as  a  "world-author"  in  the  process.  "The 
Fall  of  the  House  of  Usher"  gains  greatly  from  the 
characters  therein,  though  these  are  merely  sketches 
for  the  reader's  imagination  to  fill  out.  One  thinks 
of  "Wuthering  Heights"  and  of  the  place  in  literature 
that  would  have  been  assigned  to  Emily  Bronte  by 
Poe  admirers,  had  she  had  the  good  fortune  to  be  born 
an  American.  "The  Pit  and  The  Pendulum,"  one 
of  the  best  of  the  tales,  it  seems  to  me,  owes  much  to 
its  exceptional  "psychology"  as  an  imaginative  study 
of  real  torture  to  which  ingenuity  gives  real  point  instead 
of  merely  displaying  itself  as  ingenuity.  It  is  helped, 
too,  I  think,  by  being  localized  in  real  time  and  space; 
by  the  fact  that  there  was  such  an  institution  as  the 
Inquisition,  a  fabric  also  quite  otherwise  "  thrilling"  than 
any  of  Poe's  imagination,  and  that  the  victim's  rescuers 
had  an  actual  and  the  correct  nationality,  though  I  fear 

235 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

these  considerations  would  seem  philistine  indeed  to  the 
true  Poe  worshipper.  Furthermore,  "The  Murders 
in  the  Rue  Morgue"  forfeits  a  large  part  of  its  interest, 
the  moment  it  appears  that  the  murderer  is  an  ape  and 
not  a  human  malefactor.  Ce  n'est  que  ca,  one  feels  like 
exclaiming— and  repeating  even  when  William  Wilson's 
double  dissolves  into  his  conscience,  though  of  course 
allegorically  that  is  the  point  of  the  story,  as  well  as 
being  very  cleverly,  very  ingeniously,  managed.  Finally 
one  of  the  tales— "The  System  of  Dr.  Tarr  and  Dr. 
Fether" — has  an  exceptional  interest  because  it  is  an 
intelligent,  though  it  does  not  pretend  to  be  a  profound, 
study  of  a  phase  of  mind  and  character  under  certain 
conditions  and  in  a  certain  environment,  executed 
with  a  wholly  unaccustomed  lightness  of  touch  and  an 
aspect  of  gayety.  The  scene,  however,  it  will  be  re 
membered,  is  a  maison  de  sante  and  the  personages  are 
its  inmates.  And  nothing  is  more  characteristic  of 
Poe's  perversity  than  that  his  most  normal  fiction  should 
be  the  representation  of  the  abnormal.  The  abnormal 
was  essential  to  him,  and  he  only  varied  his  practice  of 
achieving  it  in  his  treatment  by  securing  it  in  his  mate 
rial.  Taken  with  the  whim  of  depicting  human  nature 
he  could  at  least  select  its  deflected  types.  Even  here, 
however,  his  interest  is  clearly  in  treating  his  material 
in  a  rather  ghastly  vein  of  contrasting  and  contra- 
indicated  bouffe.  He  cares  nothing  for  his  "types," 
and  his  real  success,  such  as  it  is,  is  incidental. 

Similarly  with  his  preoccupation  with  crime — almost 
an  obsession  with  him.     He  is  never  concerned  with  sin, 

236 


POE 

which  is  too  integrally  human  an  element  of  life  to 
interest  him.  Crime  on  the  contrary  is  in  comparison 
of  an  artificial  nature,  and  of  however  frequent  still  of 
exceptional  occurrence.  Undoubtedly  it  furnishes  ap 
posite  material  to  the  novelist  of  character  as  well  as  to 
the  portraitist  of  manners,  and  is  a  personal  as  well  as  a 
social  factor  in  human  life.  But  this  aspect  of  it  Poe, 
whose  criminals  are  only  criminals,  completely  ignores. 
He  uses  it  not  naturalistically  but  conventionally.  It 
is  his  conventional  machinery  for  his  story.  Like  Mme. 
Tussaud  and  Mrs.  Jarley  he  finds  in  it  the  readiest  in 
strument  of  his  most  cherished  effects.  And  so  far  as 
he  "psychologizes"  it  he  increases  its  inherent  arti 
ficiality  by  treating  it  with  morbid  imaginativeness, 
endeavoring  after  his  favorite  method  to  give  the  il 
lusion  of  reality  to  its  abnormal  repellency,  and  not  at 
all  concerned  about  demonstrating  its  real  character. 
Here  he  is  measurably  successful  in  such  a  tale  as  "The 
Imp  of  the  Perverse"  where  he  utilizes  the  well  known 
tendency  of  the  criminal  to  confess,  and  totally  fails 
in  such  absurdity  as  "The  Black  Cat,"  a  story  that 
could  hardly  have  "thrilled"  Ichabod  Crane;  but  one 
illustrates  his  lack  of  human  feeling  as  well  as  the  other. 
And  of  almost  all  the  stories  into  which  the  element  of 
humanity  enters  perforce,  it  may  be  said,  finally,  that 
the  residuum  is  not  so  much  worth  while  as  to  earn  ne 
glect  of  his  shortcomings  in  a  respect  normally  vital 
to  the  kind  of  thing  he  is  doing.  In  a  word  the  "Poe" 
in  his  stories  could  only  be  moving  and  effective,  if  this 
element  were  oresent  also. 

237 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

For  the  only  thing  that  can  give  any  significance,  any 
vital  interest,  any  value,  in  a  word,  to  the  weird  and  the 
fantastic  themselves  is  to  establish  them  somehow  in 
some  human  relationship — as  Hoffmann  does.  Other 
wise  they  are  simply  phenomena  that  appeal  strictly 
to  the  nerves.  Poe's  treatment  of  them  negatives  their 
sole  sanction.  "He  can  thrill  you  as  no  one  else  can," 
says  one  of  his  admirers.  As  to  that  there  are  several 
things  to  be  said.  In  the  first  place  it  depends  a  good 
deal  on  who  you  are  whether  you  are  "thrilled"  or  not. 
In  the  next  place  how  are  you  "thrilled  ?"  As  you  are 
by  the  knocking  at  the  door  in  Macbeth,  or  as  you  are 
by  a  bad  dream  or  a  gruesome  sight  in  actual  life? 
Thirdly,  are  you  thus  affected  because  the  story  is 
thrilling,  or  because,  as  I  have  already  noted,  your 
own  imagination  is  set  at  work  as  to  how  you  would  be 
affected  by  experiencing  what  you  are  reading  of — 
"The  Premature  Burial"  for  example — forgetful  of 
the  fact  that  personal  application,  than  which  nothing 
is  more  common,  notoriously  vitiates  any  objective  judg 
ment.  Finally  of  what  value  after  all  is  "gooseflesh" 
as  a  guide  to  correct  estimates  in  art?  Is  this  hyper- 
sesthetic  reaction  a  trustworthy  measure  of  real  aesthetic 
merit?  To  ask  these  questions  is  of  course  to  answer 
them.  But  even  accepting  this  effect  on  the  nerves  as 
evidence  of  Poe's  power,  even  of  his  unique  power — for 
I  think  no  other  writer  ever  essayed  it  so  baldly — its 
essential  insignificance  must  be  admitted  because  it  is 
wholly  divorced  from  any  element  of  interest  outside  of 
itself.  Instead  of  itself  being  an  element  in  a  composi- 

238 


POE 

tion,  as  with  Hoffmann,  Poe's  weirdness  is  the  whole 
thing.  An  occasional  discord  has  its  uses  in  a  work  of 
harmony,  but  the  scrannel  shriek  of  a  locomotive  per 
forms  no  function  but  that  of  irritation,  though  it  may 
"  thrill "  or  even  deafen  a  listener.  It  is  certainly  more 
important  to  be  moved  than  to  be  moved  pleasantly, 
but  to  be  moved  to  no  purpose,  to  be  agitated  aimlessly 
in  no  direction,  is  an  unsatisfactory  experience. 

It  is  needless  to  specify  instances  among  Poe's  tales 
that  illustrate  this  exclusive  appeal  to  the  nerves.  It 
would  be  difficult  to  find  any  among  those  of  the  weird 
class  that  do  not.  Besides,  in  them  it  was  his  theory, 
his  "scheme,"  to  create  this  precise  effect  and  no  other. 
The  particularly  crass  one  of  "Berenice,"  however, 
shows  his  method  in  particular  relief.  It  is  that  prod 
uct  of  his  genius  in  which  a  madman  recounts  his 
fascination  by  the  beautiful  teeth  of  his  mistress  and 
his  exhumation  of  her  remains  for  the  purpose  of  ex 
tracting  them  as  a  last  exercise  of  his  faculties  before 
losing  these  completely.  Poe  sometimes  went  too  far 
and  did  so  in  this  instance,  naively  admits  one  of  his 
earlier  editors!  As  if  it  mattered  where  along  that  line 
one  stopped.  The  partly  ridiculous,  partly  repulsive, 
wholly  inept  quality  of  the  performance  is  stamped  as 
such  at  the  start.  The  serious  workmanship  only  em 
phasizes  the  fact  that  the  personages  are  lay  figures,  the 
motif  insane,  the  story  incredible.  As  a  ship-shape  and 
coherent  account  of  incoherent  horror  it  may  contain  a 
"thrill"  for  the  predisposed,  but  it  is  fully  as  fitted  to 
wake  a  smile  as  a  shudder  and  there  is  obviously  no 

239 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

standard  by  which  to  admeasure  this  sort  of  thing 
except  that  of  technical  execution.  Any  reader  of 
"Berenice"  not  a  neurasthenic  must  inevitably  ask, 
"What  of  it?"  Having  no  import  it  has  no  import 
ance. 


"Berenice"  epitomizes  very  well  Poe's  lack  of  sub 
stance,  and  the  insignificance  of  the  fantastic  element 
in  his  work  which  this  lack  of  substance  involves.  It 
also  illustrates  the  aridity  of  his  imagination.  Imagina 
tion  is,  in  the  view  of  most  of  his  admirers,  probably  his 
most  striking,  his  most  salient  possession.  But  it  is 
darkening  counsel  to  stop  with  this  mere  ascription  as 
if  imagination  were  an  invariable  rather  than  a  protean 
faculty.  Foe's  imagination  was  of  a  peculiarly  per 
sonal  kind.  It  intensified  his  divining  powers,  but 
never  extended  his  range  of  thought.  It  was  thoroughly, 
integrally,  analytic.  His  "Tales  of  Conscience,"  as 
they  have  been  called,  deal  mechanically  so  far  as  they 
do  not  deal  conventionally  with  conscience.  There  is 
no  largely  imaginative  treatment  of  it.  They  summar 
ize  phenomena  deduced  from  remorse  and  fear  as 
forces  and,  confined  to  crime  as  they  are,  involve  little 
imaginative  psychology.  His  imaginings  are  largely 
inventive,  and  important  as  the  imagination  is  to  the 
inventor,  the  tendency  to  invention  is  apt  to  imply  an 
inferior  order  of  it.  The  poets  are  sadly  lacking  in  the 
inventive  faculty.  It  is  essentially  logical,  concaten 
ated,  mechanical.  It  has  no  spiritual  and  no  sensuous 

240 


POE 

side.  Foe's  inventiveness  is  his  chief  mental  trait  and 
his  imagination  was  its  servant.  He  is  perhaps  at  his 
best  in  "The  Gold  Bug" — to  Foe's  partisans  a  miracle 
of  imaginative  invention  but  only  to  his  partisans  any 
thing  else.  His  spiritual  side  is  illustrated  by  his 
"Ligeias,"  "  Eleonoras "  and  "Morellas"— which  meas 
ured  by  a  serious  standard  are  scarcely  more  than  mor 
bid  moonings.  The  ingenuity  of  his  one  spiritual  tale, 
"William  Wilson"  is  far  more  in  evidence  than  its 
imaginativeness.  It  is  an  extremely  artistic  piece  of 
workmanship  and  shows  what  Foe's  art  could  do  in 
the  service  of  truth  instead  of  mystification.  But  only 
up  to  the  point  when  you  perceive  it  is  mystification 
after  all.  Curiously,  then  the  effect  deliquesces — when 
its  meaning  appears — with  the  entrance  of  avowed 
allegory.  The  whole  thing  becomes  insubstantial  be 
cause  his  imagination  is  unequal  to  conducting  his  fine 
conception  to  its  conclusion  without  destroying  his 
illusion.  His  sensuousness  is  distinctly  rudimentary, 
all  glitter  and  tinsel,  ebony  and  silver.  His  consecra 
tion  to  beauty  seems  a  little  ironical  in  the  light  of  his 
too  frequent  conception  of  it.  Witness  "The  Assign 
ation,"  with  its  "mingled  and  conflicting  perfumes, 
reeking  up  from  strange  convolute  censers,  together 
with  multitudinous  flaring  and  flickering  tongues  of 
emerald  and  violet  fire"  its  "thousand  reflections  from 
curtains  which  rolled  from  their  cornices  like  cataracts 
of  molten  silver,"  its  "beams  of  natural  glory"  which 
"  mingled  at  length  fitfully  with  the  artificial  light  and  lay 
weltering  in  subdued  masses  upon  a  carpet  of  rich,  liquid- 

241 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

looking  cloth  of  Chili  gold" — all  of  which  "richesse  de 
cafe,"  as  Balzac  would  call  it,  suggests  Thackeray 
caricaturing  Disraeli  and  Bulwer  combined — those 
twin  sources  of  Foe's  style  according  to  his  latest  editors, 
who,  however,  must  have  been  thinking  only  of  its 
extravagances,  as  his  style  in  general  is  admirable. 

In  any  case  such  writing  is  not  sensuous  but  scenic. 
And  Poe  had  no  more  the  sensuous  than  the  sensual 
strain.  The  sensual  as  commonly  understood  does  not 
exist  for  him,  apparently,  as  it  is  apt  not  to  in  persons 
of  his  variety  of  nervous  organization,  and  his  writings 
it  is  to  be  pointed  out  have  this  signal  negative  merit. 
But  he  perhaps  pays  for  it  in  some  degree  by  an  ex 
traordinary  aridity  in  the  whole  sensuous  sphere.  When 
he  enters  this  he  is  either  perfectly  insignificant  or  else 
his  taste  deserts  him.  He  is  too  insincere  to  succeed  in 
it.  His  nature  requires  the  element  of  the  artificial 
which  distinguishes  the  scenic.  His  genius  was  cer 
tainly  a  striking  one  and  if  he  was  a  charlatan  he  cer 
tainly  had  a  genius  for  charlatanry.  He  revelled  in 
the  specious.  The  vivid  aspect  of  reality  he  gave  to  his 
creations  is  due  to  his  skill  in  its  use,  for  he  never  felt 
reality  and  was  impervious  to  its  appeal  as  the  true  con 
stitution  of  the  universe,  moral  and  material.  What  he 
desired  was  to  be  striking.  He  says  so  in  so  many 
words  in  one  of  his  disingenuous  (or  merely  perverse, 
who  knows  ?)  argumentations,  contending  that  any  one 
can  be  original  if  he  will.  And  his  usual  means  of 
accomplishing  it  was  by  giving  through  speciousness  the 
semblance  of  reality  to  the  unreal  and  incredible.  He 

242 


POE 

relied  on  this  far  more  than  even  on  his  scenic  imagin 
ation,  though  his  scenic  imagination  gave  him  great 
power  of  vivid  material  realization ;  his  landscapes  are 
stereoscopic.  The  scenic,  however,  demands  scale. 
With  Poe  the  scale  is  too  small.  His  stage  is  lilliputian. 
He  is  so  fond  of  the  lime-light  in  itself  that  he  floods  his 
picture  with  it.  But  for  the  proper  play  of  this  illumin- 
ant  more  time  and  space  are  needed  than  his  cabinet 
canvas  contains.  His  imagination  is  not  rich  enough 
to  engender  extension,  endue  it  with  continuity  and 
crowd  it  with  action.  His  action  is  always  meagre  and, 
one  may  say,  deduced  from,  rather  than  largely  illustra 
tive  of,  his  idea.  Or  else  it  is  conventional,  as  in  the 
"Adventures  of  A.  Gordon  Pym"  which  is  the  acme  of 
stereotyped  "  adventure,"  imitating  even  the  religious 
out-givings  of  "Robinson  Crusoe"  with  grotesquely  me 
chanical  effect. 

On  the  other  hand  he  was  full  of  ideas.  If  he  lacked 
the  visualizing  moral  power  of  the  image-making 
faculty,  if  his  action  and  incidents  are  meagre  and  gain 
their  aspect  of  reality  through  a  specious  art  of  pres 
entation  rather  than  by  the  actual  incarnation  of  ar 
tistic  vision,  what  eminently  he  did  not  lack  was  fer 
tility  in  intellectual  conception.  Sixty-eight  stories, 
whatever  their  average  quality,  are  a  good  many. 
His  picture  might  be  vague,  but  it  never  lacked  subject. 
He  cannot  be  said  to  have  lived  in  the  world  of  ideas,  in 
the  accepted  sense  of  the  phrase,  for  he  had  but  a 
smattering  acquaintance  with  its  established  consensus. 
Predeterminedly  original,  however,  he  created  his  own. 

243 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

Artist  as  he  was,  he  was  nevertheless  far  more  predis 
posed  to  the  abstract  than  to  the  concrete,  except  in  the 
purely  material  sphere;  he  began  with  principle  and 
proceeded  to  phenomena,  in  irreproachably  deductive 
fashion.  Analytical  as  he  was,  he  conducted  his  analy 
sis  deductively;  he  had  a  passion  for  ratiocination,  but 
he  argues  synthetically.  His  conclusion  is  always  his 
own  point  of  departure — artistically  withheld  till  the 
climax  is  reached  in  the  verification  of  hypothesis.  This 
is  the  difference  between  M.  Dupin  and  the  inductive 
Zadig,  for  example.  He  was  tremendously  concerned 
with  theory,  a  circumstance  that  gives  point  to  his  criti 
cism  and  coherence  to  his  tales,  however  it  may  devita 
lize  his  poetry.  His  mind  was  highly  speculative,  in 
quiring,  even  inquisitional.  He  had  a  prodigious 
interest  in  problems,  puzzles,  rebuses — an  interest  that 
to  those  who  do  not  share  it  is  apt  to  seem  inept.  He 
was  in  a  way  a  conjurer  in  literature.  He  delighted  in 
mystification — which  is  as  much  as  to  say  he  had  no 
other  interest  in  mystery.  He  was  less  of  a  mystic 
than  any  writer  who  has  ever  dealt  with  the  mysterious. 
He  had  vastly  more  affinity  with  Cagliostro  than  with 
Hoffmann  from  whom — inexplicably — he  is  so  often  said 
to  derive.  Without  the  vanity  he  had  the  conceit  and 
enjoyed  the  complacence  of  the  prestidigitator. 

In  his  early  studies,  mathematics,  and  in  his  later 
reading,  science  in  general,  attracted  him  most  genuinely. 
With  all  his  gift  for  language  it  interested  him  mainly 
as  syntax,  and  his  knowledge  of  languages  was  as 
superficial  as  his  care  for  letters.  His  French  for  ex- 

244 


POE 

ample — which  is  not  infrequent — is  what  he  would  cen 
sure  in  another  as  culpably  ignorant.  He  may  be  said, 
indeed,  to  have  indulged  his  mathematical  turn  in 
his  philosophy  of  life— or  whatever  may  serve  to 
pass  for  it  with  him;  of  course  as  such  he  had  no 
philosophy  of  life.  His  interest  in  ideas  did  not  extend 
to  moral  ones,  of  which  he  had  none.  The  whole  world 
of  morals  was  a  terra  incognita  to  him — not  at  all  the 
same  thing  as  saying,  which  is  also  true,  that  he  had 
no  morals.  Coleridge,  for  example,  has  been  said  to 
have  had  none,  but  he  was  immensely  concerned  with 
their  philosophy.  Poe's  personal  egotism  accentuated 
by  his  indulgence  freed  him  from  a  sense  of  personal  re 
sponsibility  no  doubt,  but  the  singular  thing  about  him  as 
a  writer  is  that  man's  moral  nature  made  no  appeal  to 
his  imagination.  Morbid  psychology,  to  be  sure,  was 
a  part  of  his  material,  but  he  used  it  almost  altogether 
as  a  means  mainly  mechanical  to  the  production  of  a 
dramatic  effect.  And  even  here  his  general  ideas  have 
not  the  scope  and  freedom  they  have  in  the  purely 
intellectual  sphere,  but  evince  the  succinct  specific  quality 
that  marks  the  " notation"  of  phenomena.  So  that 
even  his  determination  to  the  abnormal  does  not  in  the 
unfamiliar  moral  sphere  remark  any  law  of  general  im 
port—except  such  commonplaces  as  the  tendency  of 
the  criminal  to  confession  already  noted.  And  of  course, 
as  regards  morals  in  the  extended  sense,  he  had,  about 
man's  habits  and  customs,  around  which  the  imagina 
tion  of  the  normal  literary  artist  plays  perpetually,  no 
ideas  at  all,  either  general  or  otherwise. 

245 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

In  brief,  his  lack  of  moral  imagination  accounts  for  the 
vacuity  of  his  writings.  A  writer's  product  is  character 
ized  in  great  part  by  what  he  lacks  as  well  as  by  what  he 
possesses,  by  his  defects  as  well  as  by  his  qualities.  It  is 
no  reproach  to  a  theological  writer  to  be  ignorant  of  the 
fine-arts  unless  he  refers  to  them.  On  the  other  hand 
it  would  be  an  insufficient  characterization  of  a  land 
scape  painter  to  say  that  he  could  paint  clouds  if  he 
could  not  paint  trees,  though  certainly  if  he  painted 
clouds  extraordinarily  well,  that  would  be  the  most 
important  thing  to  say  about  him,  as  it  would  signalize 
his  contribution  to  landscape  art,  besides  which  his 
failure  in  any  respect  would  be  more  negligible.  The 
theory  of  criticism,  however,  which  holds  that  the  ex 
cellences  of  a  performance  are  alone  worth  attention, 
that  it  is,  unlike  a  rope,  to  be  judged  only  by  its  strong 
est  part,  and  that  the  function  of  criticism  is  really  the 
judicial  dispensing  of  rewards  of  merit,  is  unsatisfactory 
and  provincial.  The  whole  work  is  there  calling  for 
critical  account  and,  due  attention  paid  to  the  matter 
of  emphasis  and  accent,  its  sins  both  of  commission  and 
omission  are  germane  to  critical  consideration.  In 
practice  the  other  theory  leads  to  notorious  confusion 
and — as  Americans  at  least  must  be  constantly  reminded 
— the  distinction  between  good  and  bad  is  obscured  by 
mechanically  ascribing  to  a  failure  the  characteristics 
of  a  performer's  successes.  At  all  events  it  is  pertinently 
illuminating  to  find  a  writer  of  tales,  criticism  and 
poetry  deficient  in  the  philosophy  of  life,  letters  and 
feeling,  not  only  because  this  at  once  ranks  his  product 

246 


POE 

and  measures  its  value,  but  on  account  of  the  light  it 
throws  on  his  productive  faculty  itself— his  imagination. 
It  is  a  just  reproach  to  Hawthorne  that  he  suffered  the 
genius  that  produced  ''The  Scarlet  Letter"  to  produce 
little  or  nothing  else  comparable  with  it.  But  the  case 
is  quite  different  with  Poe,  because  tales,  criticism  and 
poetry  of  real  value  cannot  be  written  or  can  only 
occasionally  be  written  with  Poe's  equipment.  The 
wonder  is  not  that  he  did  not  succeed  oftener,  but  that 
he  succeeded  at  all,  as  assuredly  he  did  in  his  own  way — 
one  can  hardly  say  his  own  genre,  since  he  had  no  con 
geners. 

It  is  a  mistake  to  try  to  classify  him.  He  is  very 
strictly  sui  generis.  So  appalling  an  egoist  could 
hardly  fail  to  be.  No  more  superficial  association  was 
ever  made  than  in  relating  him  to  Hoffmann,  in  whom 
the  weird  and  the  fantastic  are  always  in  close  and 
generally  in  affectionate  companionship  with  sentiment 
and  humor.  "Where  form  dominates"  says  Balzac, 
"sentiment  disappears,"  and  in  the  temperament  of  the 
technician  humor  has  as  little  place  as  sentiment. 
Notoriously  Poe  had  none  of  either.  He  was  an  artist 
with  a  controlling  bent  toward  artifice,  exaggeratedly 
theoretic,  convinced  that  the  beautiful  is  the  strange 
and  the  sad  the  poetic,  and  exercising  his  imagination 
through  every  expedient  of  ingenious  invention,  to  the 
end  of  producing  effects  of  strangeness  to  the  point  of 
abnormality  and  of  sadness  to  the  point  of  horror. 
Compact  of  neurotic  sensationalism  and  saturated  with 
the  specious,  Poe's  "thrilling"  tales  taken  in  the  mass 

247 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

illustrate  the  most  detestable  misuse  of  imaginative 
powers  within  the  limits  of  serious  literature,  and  only 
fall  within  these  limits  by  the  intellectual  vigor  which 
oftenest  they  argue  rather  than  evince.  "It's  a  weary 
feast,"  says  Thackeray  "that  banquet  of  wit  where  no 
love  is."  And  Poe's  banquet  is  as  bereft  of  wit  as  it  is 
destitute  of  love.  He  lacked  humor  and  he  lacked  heart. 


VI 

If  even  his  imagination  was  thus  limited  it  was  per 
haps  partly  because  the  field  of  its  exercise  was  naturally 
limited  by  his  lack  of  culture.  He  had  no  culture  prop 
erly  so  called.  He  applied  the  schoolmaster's  rod  to 
others  with  the  gusto  of  pretentiousness,  but  discipline 
is  precisely  and  par  excellence  what  he  lacked  himself. 
He  is  the  notablest  example  to  be  found  among  men  of 
letters  of  a  writer  living  exclusively  in  the  realm  of 
the  intellect  without  developing  or  enriching  his  own. 
His  first  work  is  as  good  as  his  last.  He  read  much  but 
without  purpose.  In  this  single  respect  his  editors  have 
perhaps  done  him  somewhat  less  than  justice  in  saying 
"His  sources  were,  at  first,  books  of  which  Disraeli's 
'Curiosities  of  Literature'  is  a  type,  and  in  science  some 
elementary  works;  generally  he  seems  to  have  read 
books  only  for  review,  as  they  came  under  his  notice 
at  random,  but  he  paid  much  attention  to  the  magazines, 
home  and  foreign,  throughout  his  life."  Desultory  as 
his  reading  was  it  was  not  indolent  and  hap-hazard. 
Devoid  of  sentiment,  he  eschewed  "trash."  And  with- 

248 


POE 

out  any  spirit  of  suite,  or  any  persistent  amassing  of 
knowledge,  still  less  with  any  ordered  and  philosophic 
acquisition,  his  purely  intellectual  organization  led  him 
into  the  realm  of  learning,  where  he  was  distinctly  at 
home  without,  however,  possessing  the  moral  purpose 
to  benefit  by  his  stay.  He  satisfied  his  curiosity,  follow 
ing  an  indubitable  natural  bent,  without  engaging  his 
responsibility  or  really  increasing  his  knowledge.  There 
is  no  such  absurd  fatras  in  literature  as  the  absurd  "  Eu 
reka."  He  found  his  practical  account  in  these  excur 
sions.  All  was  grist  that  came  to  his  mill.  Just  as  he 
read  the  current  product  for  journalistic  ends,  he  pursued 
in  literature  out-of-the-way  paths  in  search  of  the  odd  and 
the  unfamiliar  with  a  similar  motive — at  least  with  a 
similar  result.  What  he  found  there  served  to  decorate 
his  own  writing  with  the  unconventional  and  the  rec 
ondite.  His  writing  is  bedizened  with  the  frippery  of 
learning  often,  but  one  suspects  that  most  of  the  goods, 
in  familiar  phrase,  are  in  the  shop-window.  And  his 
etalage  of  learning  is  that  of  the  literary  charlatan — an 
arsenal  of  the  occult  and  the  obscure,  the  abstruse  and 
the  exotic,  above  all  the  esoteric  and  the  technical,  the 
whole  chosen  and  calculated  to  impose  on  the  credulous 
and  mesmerize  the  impressionable. 

But  it  is  doubtful  if  any  one  of  his  circle  had  as  much 
reading.  In  this  respect  he  belonged  rather  in  the  New 
England  that  he  constantly  jeered  at  as  provincial  and 
hated  with  a  genuine  and  sometimes  clairvoyant  hatred. 
The  weaknesses  of  Isaac  are  apparent  enough  to  Ish- 
mael  and  though  his  railing  at  them  may  seem  Bedouin 

249 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

to  the  Brahmin,  it  is  not  to  be  called  Boeotian.  There 
was  probably  no  one  within  the  purview  of  Trans 
cendentalism  capable  of  writing  the  following :  "  Sculpt 
ure,  although  in  its  nature  rigorously  poetical,  was  too 
limited  in  its  extent  and  consequence  to  have  occupied, 
at  any  time,  much  of  his  attention."  Possibly  Poe  was 
not  and  got  it  from  Goethe,  as  almost  certainly  he  did 
the  remark  on  the  next  page  of  "The  Domain  of  Arn- 
heim:"  "No  such  paradises  are  to  be  found  in  reality 
as  have  glowed  on  the  canvas  of  Claude" — a  landscape 
by  whom  he  had  probably  never  seen.  It  is  difficult  to 
determine  the  true  inventory  of  the  predatory,  but  ap 
preciation  of  Goethe's  sestheticism  is  in  itself  a  distinc 
tion  for  Poe's  time.  Nor  is  he  to  be  called  bohemian. 
His  habits  were  irregular  enough,  but  the  bohemian  has 
no  intellectual  curiosity,  and  Poe  was  made  of  it.  The 
bohemian  is  content  "merely  to  bask  and  ripen."  Poe 
was  a  worker.  His  irregularities  have  obscured  for  us 
his  exceptional  industry.  They  interfered  sadly  with 
his  accomplishment,  but  with  its  amount  far  less  than 
with  its  character.  In  spite  of  them  he  kept  at  work — 
or  at  least  returned  to  work  when  he  could.  His  indi 
gence  and  the  heavy  pressure  of  it  on  the  two  beings  he 
cared  for  were  a  constant  stimulus  to  a  nature  that, 
whatever  its  faults,  knew  not  supineness.  With  even 
less  urgent  need  he  would  have  worked  as  hard — 
perhaps  even,  considering  the  instability  of  his  nervous 
organization,  to  better  purpose,  since  he  would  have 
been  less  harried  by  the  cormorant  care.  He  had  the 
disposition  of  the  fighter,  and  his  failings  did  not  mine 

250 


POE 

his  fortitude  nor  his  failures  discourage,  however  they 
might  transiently  deject  him.  He  was  not  an  idler  or 
a  dreamer.  His  mental  activity  was  constantly  in 
formed  with  purpose,  and  directed  with  assiduity.  He 
was  always  full  of  energy  when  he  was  not  hamstrung 
by  exhaustion.  No  bohemian  produces  ten  volumes. 
When  his  ambitious  and  sometimes  arrogant  plans  met 
shipwreck,  owing  in  general  no  doubt  to  his  own  evil 
genius,  he  made  new  ones.  Never  handicapped  by 
modesty  or  even  the  prudences  of  self-distrust,  he  was 
undeterred  by  obstacles  and  undismayed  by  misfortune. 
If  he  did  not  have  a  proud  soul,  at  least  his  egotism 
conserved  his  identity  unimpaired,  even  in  the  disin 
tegration  of  his  faculties,  and  to  the  last  made  the  most 
of  what  his  errors  had  left  him.  Next  to  his  art  it  is 
his  energy  that  by  demonstrating  his  capacity  distin 
guishes  him  and  makes  him  a  marked  figure  in  our 
literature. 

He  had  an  English  experience  in  impressionable 
school-boy  days — which  served  him  to  real  purpose  in 
"William  Wilson,"  probably  the  solidest  of  his  tales. 
But  he  never  travelled,  and  in  this  respect  he  inevitably 
seems  limited,  even  boyish,  in  comparison  with  many 
of  his  contemporaries.  It  is  hardly  necessary  to  say  that 
this  was  a  limitation  he  did  not  himself  feel.  But  if  his 
egotism  amounted  even  to  bumptiousness,  as  it  did,  it 
was  naturally  associated  with  great  independence.  He 
did  his  own  thinking.  He  was  constantly  "sizing  up" 
everything,  especially  others,  and  could  on  this  account 
alone  hardly  have  been  popular,  even  among  the  lowly 

251 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

spirited  to  whom  arrogance  and  imperiousness,  or  even 
the  caricature  of  those  vices,  seem  not  defects  but 
qualities.  They  were  especially  evident,  along  with 
more  amiable  ones,  in  his  criticism,  which  forms  several 
volumes  of  his  complete  works,  which  he  wrote  more 
incisively,  not  to  say  more  successfully,  on  the  whole 
than  any  of  his  few  contemporary  competitors,  and  for 
which  he  certainly  showed  the  aptitudes  of  real  pene 
tration  and  a  philosophic  stand-point.  He  lacks,  to  be 
sure  one  of  the  chief  qualifications  of  the  critic,  the 
critical  temper.  It  is  in  his  criticism  that  his  "journal 
ism"  appears  most  obviously.  And  his  journalism 
was  that  of  his  day,  the  farthest  possible  removed  from 
the  critical  temper.  It  has  instead  the  polemic  temper. 
And  his  polemic  was  extremely  personal.  Its  tone  is 
often  extremely  contemptuous.  The  lining,  as  the 
French  say,  of  his  praise  is  sometimes  abuse  of  those 
who  differ  with  him.  His  praise  of  Hawthorne  is 
highly  spiced  with  contempt  for  the  neglect  of  Haw 
thorne  that  he  charged  upon  New  England.  He  felt 
the  sectionalism  of  New  England  as  of  course  no  writer, 
not  himself  a  New  Englander,  could  fail  to  do.  But  he 
treats  it  with  a  self-answering  excess  in  his  references  to 
"the  Emersons  and  Alcotts  and  Fullers."  His  treat 
ment  of  Longfellow  is  another  instance.  Longfellow 
is  something  of  a  quack  himself,  he  says,  but  his  repu 
tation  is  what  mainly  strikes  him,  and  this  he  thinks  al 
most  altogether  due  to  the  quackery  of  Longfellow's 
friendly  environment.  He  makes  elaborate  accusations 
of  plagiarism  against  him,  and  then  at  the  conclusion  of 

252 


POE 

his  philippic  takes  it  all  back  or  at  all  events  whittles  it 
down  to  a  negligible  point,  with  the  obvious  result,  of 
course,  of  making  his  own  article  negligible.  Perhaps 
he  had  not  enough  purpose  to  be  called  malevolent. 
He  was  rather  irritable  than  imperious,  perhaps,  in  his 
lack  of  any  feeling  of  responsibility,  in  which  case  he 
must  be  acquitted  of  more  malign  motive  than  that  of 
the  strutting  and  consciously  clever  Ishmael  bent  on 
self  assertion.  To  call  Carlyle  an  "ass"  and  Emerson 
his  imitator  was  but  a  way  like  another  of  calling  at 
tention  to  himself.  So,  possibly,  were  his  equally  ex 
travagant  eulogies.  Such  primitive  "methods"  were 
certainly  more  in  vogue  in  his  day  than  in  ours.  The 
journalism  to  which  his  work  formally  belonged  or  with 
which  it  had  notable  affiliations  bristled  with  "person 
alities,"  so-called.  But  Poe  has  claims  inconsistent 
with  the  cloaking  of  his  faults  by  the  mantle  of  his  time, 
and  certainly  no  writer  of  his  time,  even,  of  anything 
like  his  powers  wrote  criticism  of  this  particular  order 
of  simplicity.  If  it  had  been  as  prevalent  as  it  was 
primitive  we  may  be  sure  he  would  have  avoided  it  in 
his  consecration  to  "originality"  and  aversion  to  custom 
and  the  common. 

Cavilling  came  naturally  to  him.  He  began  it  early. 
It  was  perhaps  the  edge  of  his  adolescent  cleverness. 
"I  never  heard  him  speak  in  terms  of  praise  of  any 
English  writer  living  or  dead"  says  a  fellow  cadet  at 
West  Point — testimony  to  a  natural  bent,  at  least.  As 
he  matured  and  began  to  write  he  necessarily  modified 
it,  but  never  beyond  clear  recognition.  He  was  in 

253 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

fact,  rather  better  in  its  practice  than  when  he  varied 
it  with  eulogy.  There  is  more  truth,  for  example,  in  his 
remark  about  Carlyle,  whom  he  did  not  in  the  least  ap 
preciate,  that  his  manner  "is  conventional— with  him 
self,"  than  in  his  characterization  of  Tennyson,  whom 
he  adored,  as  "the  greatest  of  all  poets  living  or  dead." 
His  laudation  of  the  galaxy  of  female  poets  whose 
praises  he  sang  so  enthusiastically  is  ascribed  by 
Stedman  to  his  chivalry — an  admission  that  he  did  not 
take  either  the  sex  or  his  function  very  seriously.  And 
in  truth  his  various  judgments,  favorable  or  other,  are 
less  trustworthy  than  those  of  any  other  critic  of  his 
general  eminence.  He  could  not  have  learned  much 
from  his  contemporaries  here  if,  as  he  says,  "  Our  most 
analytic  if  not  altogether  our  best  critic  (Mr.  Whipple, 
perhaps,  excepted)  is  Mr.  William  A.  Jones."  And  in 
fact,  in  his  day  criticism  among  us — and  measurably  in 
England — had  even  closer  relations  than  it  has  to-day 
with  the  function  discharged  by  professors  of  rhetoric 
and  was  rather  elementary  and  of  a  hole  and  corner 
character.  On  the  whole,  it  may  be  said  that  in  spite 
of  his  penetration,  which  was  keen  within  narrow 
enough  limits,  he  indulged  his  propensity  to  personal 
irresponsibility  rather  more  than  less  in  his  criticism  than 
in  his  tales  and — naturally — much  more  than  in  his 
poems;  yet  that  on  the  other  hand  his  criticism  shows 
incidentally  the  same  alert  mental  activity  and  intel 
lectual  curiosity. 

His  mental   activity  was  indeed   extraordinary— so 
much  so  as  apparently  to  be  deemed  by  him  almost  an 

254 


POE 

end  in  itself.  To  what  purpose  or  upon  what  sub 
stance  his  mind  was  engaged  was  of  small  moment  so 
long  as  it  functioned.  But  to  the  fact  that  it  did  func 
tion  so  actively  is  probably  due  the  specific  excellence, 
as  his  penetration  is  the  specific  quality,  of  his  criticism, 
namely,  that  like  much  of  his  fiction  it  is  ratiocinative 
and  neither  canonical  as  so  much  past,  nor  impression 
ist  as  so  much  current,  criticism  is.  He  was  dogmatic 
enough,  and  absurdly  autocratic,  but  his  dogmas 
were  not  conventions.  On  the  other  hand  he  had  ideas 
about  the  matter  in  hand  and  did  not  "recount  the 
adventures  of  his  soul  among  masterpieces" — though 
it  is  to  be  said  that  acknowledged  masterpieces  did  not 
greatly  interest  his  soul  to  which  they  doubtless  afforded 
too  little  polemic  material.  His  ideas  were  often  mere 
notions.  With  his  theoretic  bent  they  could  hardly 
be  otherwise.  But  in  form,  at  least,  they  were  con 
spicuously  rationalized.  Reasons  with  him  were  as 
plenty  as  blackberries.  He  delighted,  in  French  phrase, 
to  remuer  them— fussily,  perhaps,  rather  than  pro 
foundly  and  largely,  no  doubt,  by  way  of  what  he  him 
self  calls  "kicking  up  a  bobbery,"  but  energetically 
and  unceasingly.  And  though  whistling  as  one  goes 
even  from  excess  instead  of  want  of  thought  is  still  only 
whistling,  nevertheless  the  phenomena  of  so  much 
mental  activity  occupied  with  something  quite  other 
than  Transcendentalism,  exalting  beauty  to  the  point  of 
declaring  its  incompatibility  with  truth,  must  have 
been  interesting  in  his  day.  In  fact  it  still  has  a  certain 
piquancy.  But  his  reasons  were  not  the  fruit  of  inquiry. 

255 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

They  were  "  immediately  beheld  "  justifications  of  his  pref 
erences,  and  his  mental  furniture  was  not  rich  enough 
for  the  production  of  any  a  priori  reflections  of  range 
and  moment.  He  never  speculated  as  Balzac,  in  similar 
case,  observing:  " There  must  be  a  cause  for  this 
singularity."  He  was  only  too  pleased  to  rest  in  the 
singularity,  to  establish  and  flaunt  it.  He  was  much 
impressed  by  the  saying  he  cites  more  than  once  from 
"Lord  Verulam:"  " There  is  no  exquisite  beauty  which 
has  not  some  strangeness  in  its  proportion,"  but  he 
does  not  press  the  matter  further,  and  is  too  content  to 
get  authority  for  "strangeness" — which  was  precisely 
his  affair — to  appreciate  that  its  service  as  an  accent  does 
not  involve  its  value  as  an  element  even,  to  say  nothing 
of  his  own  practice  of  enforcing  its  predominance  as  a 
factor.  The  portion  of  his  reasoning  that — naturally — 
has  most  interest  is  that  concerned  with  linguistic  tech- 
nic.  He  would  have  made  a  stimulating  professor  of 
prosody,  in  spite  of  his  "  crotchets,"  as  Stedman  calls 
them,  and  his  extravagance  is  in  this  field  altogether 
more  suggestive  than  in  any  other. 


VII 

He  had,  in  short,  a  fine  mind  which  he  neither  dis 
ciplined,  nor  stored,  nor  developed;  the  unusual  ac 
tivity  of  which  was  stimulated  and  guided  by  intel 
lectual  curiosity ;  of  which  invention  and  logic  were  more 
marked  traits  than  imagination  and  poetic  feeling;  and 
of  which  he  made  effective  but  unscrupulous  usage 

256 


POE 

to  no  particular  purpose.  There  is  nothing  very 
sinister  in  Poe,  except  the  desire  to  produce  sinister 
effects.  And  since  these,  as  I  have  said,  are  apt  to  fail 
through  the  obviousness  of  their  motive  and  the  crudity 
of  their  means,  they  leave  a  merely  disagreeable  and 
not  a  sinister,  a  morbid  and  perverse  not  at  all  a  satanic, 
impression  of  the  genius  they  express,  though  it  is  un 
deniable  that  a  good  many  of  the  tales  recall  Emerson 's 
description  of  Mephistopheles :  "pure  intellect  ap 
plied — as  always  there  is  a  tendency — to  the  service  of 
the  senses."  His  literary  and  artistic  far  exceeded  his 
personal  temperament,  and  he  had  appetites  rather 
than  passions.  His  lack  of  sensuousness  was  agreeably 
accompanied  by  an  apparently  complete  emancipation 
from  the  sensual.  There  is  simply  no  sex  in  his  writings, 
and  was  not  in  his  life  till  he  went  completely  to  pieces. 
His  unscrupulousness  and  indelicacies  with  regard  to 
ways  and  means,  to  be  sure,  began  early,  but  his  attitude 
toward  them,  if  it  betrayed  a  ferocious  egotism,  showed 
also  the  distinctly  unmoral  nature — the  shallower  side 
of  the  instinct  for  self-preservation,  not  its  perversion. 
If  he  was  a  charlatan  he  never  saw  any  harm  in  being 
one.  The  candor  of  his  duplicity  emulates  sincerity. 
And  he  looked  on  literature  as  the  adventurer  views  his 
field  of  operation,  not  as  the  enthusiast  his  cause  or  the 
regularly  enlisted  his  profession — a  fact  wholly  germane 
to  any  consideration  of  his  success  in  it,  quite  apart  from  its 
bearing  on  the  character  of  the  man  behind  his  writings. 
His  legend  has  grown  curiously  since  his  death.  The 
reasons  for  it  are  of  course  largely  romantic,  personal 

257 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

rather  than  literary.  He  is  distinctly  so  much  the  most, 
as  to  be  almost  the  only,  romantic  figure  of  our  literature; 
and  his  romantic  interest  has  greatly  influenced  the 
critical  estimate  of  his  work.  In  the  first  place  it  has 
led  to  the  production  of  an  unusual  amount  of  criticism 
of  this.  And  this  criticism  has  been  increasingly 
favorable.  His  contemporaries  took  a  much  less 
extravagant  view  of  it.  For  them  there  was  less  mystery 
about  Poe  himself  and  they  entertained  none  of  the  il 
lusions  that  time,  instead  of  destroying,  as  usual,  in 
Poe's  case  seems  to  have  multiplied.  Then,  too,  the 
appreciation  of  literary  art  has  greatly  increased  with  us 
— to  an  excess,  at  present,  I  think,  that  fairly  matches 
our  earlier  provincialism.  Moreover,  the  spirit  of 
literary  generosity,  particularly  abounding  in  America 
toward  our  own  authors — our  own  sommites  in  all 
fields — touched  by  the  hard  fate  and  possible  injustice 
which  Poe  endured  and  from  which  his  personal  repu 
tation  suffered  in  the  eyes  of  his  contemporaries  and 
the  succeeding  generation,  has  tended  to  exalt  his  liter 
ary  reputation,  with  no  doubt  the  instinct  that  its  ex 
altation  may  serve  to  excuse  or  at  least  obscure  his 
infirmities.  To  his  contemporaries  Poe  was  a  man 
and  a  writer  like  another,  to  be  measured  by  his  per 
formance.  To  subsequent  critics  he  gradually  came 
to  appear  as  unique  in  a  literature  especially  in  need  of 
the  element  he  represents.  And  now  it  is  difficult  to 
judge  him  in  the  interests  of  truth  without  a  melancholy 
consciousness  of  disloyalty  to  tradition.  To  recall 
once  more  Sainte-Beuve's  serviceable  remark  to  Arnold 

258 


POE 

about  Lamartine;  "he  was  important  to  us."  A  spot 
of  scarlet  in  a  monotone  of  subdued  hues,  he  naturally, 
as  we  got  further  and  further  away  from  his  time,  came 
more  and  more  to  rivet  the  attention  which  on  closer 
scrutiny  it  appears  he  does  not  repay. 

His  reputation  among  us  has  notoriously  been  greatly 
increased  by  foreign  recognition  of  his  writings.  If, 
say  his  admirers,  we  ourselves  esteem  him  because  he 
is  an  American  writer,  this  cannot  be  true  of  his  foreign 
estimation;  quite  the  contrary.  This  is  certainly 
plausible.  But  foreign  recognition  sets  such  traps  for 
our  naivete  that  it  is  prudent  to  be  a  little  on  our  guard  in 
the  presence  of  it.  The  theory  that  the  foreign  esti 
mate  previsages  posterity's  is  open  to  some  question — 
aside  from  the  fact  that  posterity  itself  may  make  mis 
takes;  Aldrich,  for  example,  acutely  argued  from  Brown 
ing's  obscurity  the  probable  injustice  of  posterity, 
preoccupied  with  obscurities  of  its  own,  to  his  incontes 
table  merits.  But  foreign  recognition  in  the  nature  of 
the  case  rewards  to  a  disproportionate  extent  the  merits 
that  especially  appeal  to  foreigners.  If,  as  Arnold 
held,  Sainte-Beuve  could  regard  Lamartine  as  im 
portant  to  the  French  without  implying  a  positive 
in  this  relative  importance,  it  is  equally  true  that  an 
exotic  may  make  an  appeal  out  of  all  proportion  to  its 
intrinsic  value  and  interest.  In  any  event  we  ought 
to  distinguish  between  foreign  recognition  of  those  of 
our  writers  who  are  classifiable  with  foreign  ones  and 
this  recognition  when  it  rewards  with  its  irresponsible 
applause  the  exceptional  and  extravagant  which  ap- 

259 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

peal  to  its  interest  in  the  novel  and  the  foreign  per 
se.  As  a  matter  of  fact  foreign  recognition  has  been 
most  generous  with  regard  to  many  of  our,  to  us,  least 
indispensable  writers.  To  put  the  matter  crudely, 
the  appreciative  foreigner  has  admirable  writers 
of  his  own;  what  he  most  appreciates  in  our  litera 
ture  is  the  queer,  the  odd,  the  qualities  from  whose 
associated  defects  he  feels  an  entire  detachment.  For 
eign  recognition  therefore  in  the  case  of  Poe's  extrava 
ganzas  and  caprices  is  not  necessarily  an  imprimatur 
of  the  same  authority  as  it  is  in  such  instances  as  those 
of  Cooper  and  Longfellow,  for  example.  It  attests  not 
the  merit  but  the  extraordinariness  of  his  writings,  and 
a  little,  no  doubt,  the  extraordinariness  of  their  being 
produced  in  America.  Gautier's  reference  to  him, 
besides  classing  him  with  Mrs.  Radcliffe  and  "Monk" 
Lewis,  is  chiefly  depreciation  of  his  environment.  And 
in  France,  at  least,  his  sponsors  were  not,  as  in  the  case 
of  Cooper,  Balzac,  and  Sainte-Beuve,  the  foremost  of 
Continental  authorities  at  the  time,  one  may  say,  but 
the  genial  and  good  natured  Gautier,  who  was  preach 
ing  the  gospel  of  romanticism  a  entrance,  and  Baude 
laire,  as  to  whose  authority  Swinburne's  praise  and 
the  current  rediscovery  of  him  by  the  dilettanti,  mainly 
of  Swinburne's  speech,  are  disconcertingly  at  vari 
ance  with  his  treatment  by  the  austere  Scherer,  our 
own  catholic  Henry  James,  and  the  trenchant  but 
impartial  Faguet,  perhaps  the  first  of  living  French 
critics,  in  whose  admirable  "Literary  History  of  France" 
his  name  does  not  appear.  It  is  also  worth  bearing  in 

260 


POE 

mind — since  prudence  in  such  a  matter  is,  as  I  say, 
commendable— that  Baudelaire,  whom  Mr.  James 
cruelly  calls  Poe's  inferior  both  as  a  charlatan  and  as  a 
genius,  had  nevertheless  an  even  greater  purely  lin 
guistic  genius  than  Foe's  and  that  the  beauty  of  his 
translation,  in  itself  celebrated,  has  been  an  appreciable 
element  in  Poe's  Continental  vogue.  In  France,  in  fact, 
our  "world-author's"  stories  appear  as  a  part  of 
Baudelaire's  complete  works. 

Besides  the  foreign  appreciation,  Poe's  fame  has  been 
forwarded  by  enjoying  the  favor  of  those  who  take  what 
may  be  called  the  professional — or  perhaps  one  may 
say  more  definitely  now-a-days  the  professorial — view 
of  letters.  This  is  somewhat  different  from  that  of  the 
disinterested  lover  of  literature,  who  is  less  concerned 
about  classification.  Tracing  the  tendencies  and  re 
cording  the  phases  of  literary  evolution,  especially  in 
a  society  so  uniform,  and  with  a  history  so  short  as  ours, 
is  a  work  in  which  accents  of  any  sharpness  must,  one 
would  say,  be  so  acceptable  as  to  be  magnified  out  of 
sheer  gratitude.  The  pleasures  of  classification  are 
simpler,  as  well  as  less  arduous,  than  those  of  charac 
terization,  and  any  intensification  of  their  pursuit  must 
be  particularly  welcome.  A  crisp  note,  a  vivid  patch 
of  color,  a  definite  point  de  repere  in  American  literary 
history  can  but  be  so  prized  by  the  literary  historian  as 
to  acquire  in  his  treatment  a  relief  somewhat  independ 
ent  of  its  intrinsic  quality.  Poe  is  the  nucleus  of 
romanticism  in  American  letters,  and  in  addition  to  his 
indubitable  importance  thus  in  supplying  a  "note"  we 

261 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

might  otherwise  have  lacked,  he  has  in  consequence 
acquired  from  the  literary  historians  and  the  critics  who 
take  their  cue  from  them,  an  adventitious  aspect  of 
real  and  intrinsic  importance  as  well.  And  this  verdict 
has  naturally  been  relied  on  by  the  extremely  unpro 
fessional  many  who  possess  those  "primitive  tastes" 
to  which,  says  Mr.  Henry  James — decidedly  our  most 
competent  critical  authority  in  such  a  matter — Poe 
particularly  appeals.  After  the  edition  of  his  writings 
by  the  late  Mr.  Stedman  and  Professor  Woodberry,  one 
can  hardly  see  how  they  could  do  otherwise.  This  piece 
of  editing  is  one  of  the  most  distinguished  examples 
of  its  art  and  a  monument  in  which  American  letters 
has  excellent  reason  for  taking  a  genuine  satisfaction. 
There  is  an  adequate  "Memoir"  condensed  with  ad 
ditions  by  Professor  Woodberry  from  his  admirable 
"Life."  There  are  three  "introductions"— to  the 
tales,  the  criticism,  and  the  poems,  respectively — beauti 
fully  written  by  the  elder  editor,  marked  and  catholic 
contributions  to  American  critical  literature,  not  quite 
convincing,  I  am  of  course  bound  to  think,  but  of  far 
finer  flavor  than  is  often  to  be  found  in  the  rather 
Barmecide  banquet  they  preface;  yet  for  this  feast 
every  scrap  of  Poe's  writings  has  been  collected,  col 
lated,  and  commented  with  an  opulence  of  apparatus 
unsurpassed  by  that  arranged  for  Shakespeare  by  Fur- 
ness,  for  Bacon  by  Spedding,  or  for  Milton  by  Masson. 
The  cult  of  Poe  is  not  in  the  interests  of  literature, 
since  as  literature  his  writings  are  essentially  valueless. 
The  interests  of  literature  occasionally  call  for  restraint 

262 


POE 

in  the  indulgence  of  Swinburne's  "  generous  pleasure 
of  praising "  not  for  the  purpose — quite  as  frequent 
with  Swinburne — of  alternating  with  it  the  delights 
of  censure  and  reprehension,  but  in  order  to  main 
tain  unobscured  and  unimpaired  the  standards  of 
literature  itself.  Literature  has  a  stronger  claim  than 
any  of  its  practitioners,  and  generously  or  ungenerously 
to  exalt  these  at  its  expense  is  to  belittle  and  betray  it. 
Hardly  any  cause  is  nobler  and  treason  to  few  so  flagrant 
or — since  the  pleasure  of  praising  is,  like  most  pro 
digalities  perhaps,  a  generous  one— so  frequent.  But 
there  is  a  particular  irrationality  in  American  over 
praise  of  Poe.  It  is  this :  unlike  foreign  literatures  and 
English  literature  as  a  whole,  American  literature — as  it 
is,  perhaps  fatuously  but  nevertheless  conveniently, 
not  to  say  inevitably,  called — has  no  background.  Its 
figures  do  not  form  part  of  a  pageant  relieved  against  a 
rich  and  varied  scenic  setting,  but  stand  in  silhouette 
before  the  black  "drop"  that  isolates  rather  than  sup 
ports  them  and  focuses  attention  on  their  individualities, 
from  the  stately  lyceum  lecturer  like  Emerson  to  the 
genial  "song  and  dance  artist,"  in  all  strictness  too 
numerous  to  mention.  Lacking — within  our  own  ex 
clusively  American  ranks,  I  repeat — ancestors  and 
traditions,  we  are  without  the  restrictive  influences  of  a 
"stream  of  tendency,"  an  orderly  evolution,  without 
that  subconscious  education  which  saves  conscious  in 
telligence  so  much  unintelligent  performance.  Our 
protestant  and  innovating  temperaments  have  really 
nothing  to  protest  against,  nothing  to  break  away  from, 

263 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

no  routine  to  vivify.  More  than  that,  we  have  com 
paratively  speaking,  nothing  to  maintain,  nothing  to 
keep  in  mind,  no  standards  in  a  word.  Such  a  romanti 
cist  as  Gautier  with  the  whole  heritage  of  the  noble 
seventeenth  and  the  enlightened  eighteenth  century 
French  literature  in  his  literary  blood  could  safely 
practise  and  preach  the  literary  freedom  which  with 
us  means  license — and  consequent  insignificance.  No 
romantic  artist  can  do  more  than  "pad  round"  the 
skeleton  he  must  have  derived  from  his  predecessors — 
at  least  in  our  day,  the  human  imagination  on  which  he 
leans  having  been  so  long  at  work.  Our  realists  are  in 
better  case — nature  being  inexhaustible.  Hence  our 
disposition  to  magnify  our  extravagant  and  capricious 
writers — such  as  Poe  and  Whitman — is  destructive 
of  our  holds  on  the  standards  which  it  is  of  the  last  im 
portance  for  us  consciously  to  keep  in  mind  since  so 
only  can  we  have  them  in  mind  at  all.  Only  an  older 
society  than  ours  can  with  impunity  cherish  and  coddle 
''les  jeunes,"  who  with  us  are  merely  out  of  the  ranks, 
however  bravely  we  may  imagine  them  at  the  head  of 
the  procession. 

It  is  true  that  the  cult  of  Poe  is,  as  I  have  said,  largely 
dependent  for  its  persistence  on  the  Poe  legend,  and  the 
legend  is  concerned  with  his  life  which  was  romance  it 
self  and  not  his  writings  which  are  considerably  its 
caricature.  But  his  life  was  quite  as  abnormal  as  his 
writings.  Beyond  doubt  it  is  largely  to  be  charged 
with  the  failures  and  shortcomings  of  these,  as  well  as, 
like  them,  lacking  itself,  however  pitiful  and  pathetic, 

264 


POE 

the  elements  of  permanent  interest.  "  Through  the 
storms  and  tempests  of  his  furious  mind"  says  Thack 
eray  of  Swift  in  a  memorable  passage  "the  stars  of  re 
ligion  and  love  break  out  in  the  blue,  shining  serenely 
though  hidden  by  the  driving  clouds  and  maddened 
hurricane  of  his  life."  We  cannot  write  of  Poe  in  this 
vein.  His  powers  were  of  a  surety  not  comparable 
with  Swift's,  but  what  prevents  his  tragedy  from  being 
relatively  as  impressive  is  its  fatal  lack  of  dignity. 
And  its  lack  of  dignity  is  due  not  to  his  errors  and 
the  payment  they  exacted  but  to  himself.  There  is 
a  tragic  pathos  in  the  ruin  wrought  by  the  empire 
of  anodyne  over  the  victim  of  an  abnormal  nervous 
organization,  that  couples  it  not  unworthily  with  mad 
ness  itself.  But  it  is  not  Foe's  gloomy  life  and  its 
ghastly  conclusion,  apt  extinction  of  a  genius  already 
honeycombed  with  demoralization,  that  robs  his 
figure  of  dignity  and  alloys  the  awfulness  of  his  fate. 
It  is  his  own  character — his  own  predetermined  organi 
zation,  if  one  chooses.  In  spite  of  his  personal  charm, 
his  was  a  baleful  spirit.  For  him  the  stars  of  religion 
and  love  do  not  break  out  in  the  blue.  Spiritually,  he 
lacked  ideality.  His  indignatio  is  not  saeva,  but  fret 
ful,  jealous,  egotist.  He  had  no  religion,  in  which  re 
spect  he  is  marked  among  poets  and  romancers.  Of 
course  I  do  not  refer  to  theology,  but  he  had  no  sense  of 
awe.  The  sense  of  awe  was  a  plaything  with  him.  It 
never  mastered  him.  He  used  it  as  one  of  the  tools  of 
his  trade — to  create  his  effects,  to  harrow  his  readers' 
nerves.  His  attitude  toward  awe  in  fact  is  essentially 

265 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

blasphemous ;  he  does  not  mock  it,  but  he  is  impervious 
to  its  influence  and  handles  it  with  the  impunity  of 
moral  insulation.  "My  whole  nature,"  he  affirms, 
"utterly  revolts  at  the  idea  that  there  is  any  being  in 
the  Universe  superior  to  myself."  Like  a  soulless 
Undine  he  is  on  this  account  quite  outside  of  our  in 
stinctive,  and  appeals  only  to  our  imaginative,  sym 
pathies. 

It  is  people's  imagination  that  has  made  him  what 
popularly  he  seems — something  quite  other  than  the 
reality.  The  star  of  love  did  gleam  fitfully  for  him 
in  the  frigid  ether  that  was  his  sky.  His  love  for 
Virginia  was  his  one  external  stimulus,  the  only  magnet 
of  his  errant  course,  the  sole  unselfish  indulgence  of  a 
nature  otherwise  in  galling  bondage  to  egotism.  His 
devotion  to  her,  however,  signal  as  it  is  in  contrast  to 
his  habitual  self-concentration,  was  apparently  chival 
rous  rather  than  passionate.  Mrs.  Clemm  shared 
it  in  large  measure,  as  her  own  adoring  affection  and 
practical  care  richly  entitled  her  to  do.  And  essential 
element  of  every  relation  as  chivalry  is,  it  is  not  ideally 
adequate  in  the  sphere  of  the  affections — where  it  needs 
the  supplement  of  self-surrender.  In  Poe's  case,  too, 
as  the  days  became  darker  and  darker  it  suffered  some 
strain,  as  "Ulalume"  perhaps  attests.  If  so,  though 
the  most  hauntingly  mournful  of  any  of  his  poems,  its 
burden  is  characteristically  un remorseful.  Compare 
it  with  the  passionate  regrets  of  Carlyle's  "Reminiscen 
ces,"  the  wild  contrition  of  a  far  from  loving  nature. 
And  it  may  aptly  be  remembered  with  regard  to  the 

266 


POE 

various  " affairs"  of  Poe's  last  years  that  he  had  already 
added  opium  to  alcohol,  and  was  the  prey  of  vagrom 
impulses  rather  than  of  any  profound  and  sincere,  how 
ever  transient,  passion.  This  is  at  once  their  superficial 
excuse  and  their  fundamental  indictment,  but  in  any 
event  they  serve  to  deepen  one's  sense  of  his  lack  of 
resource  and  illumination  in  love  as  well  as  in  that  gen 
eral  spiritual  aspiration  we  call  religion.  The  lack  of 
dignity  in  his  career  from  its  beginning  to  its  close, 
in  spite  of  his  pretensions,  his  arrogance  and  his  abound 
ing  egotism,  estranges  sympathy  as  well  as  admiration 
and  prevents  the  gloom  of  his  wretchedness  from  ob 
scuring  in  any  effective  way  the  comparative  valueless- 
ness  of  his  work.  His  errors  and  misfortunes  are  only 
to  be  understood  probably  from  the  point  of  view  of 
pathology.  From  this  point  of  view  they  must  arouse 
a  deep  compassion  and  one  intelligent  enough  to  ascribe 
the  futility  of  much  of  his  work  to  the  fated  frustration 
of  his  extraordinary  powers.  But  it  is  the  tragedy 
of  American  letters  that  the  one  absolute  artist  of  our 
elder  literature  should,  in  any  marked  degree,  require  a 
chivalrous,  rather  than  requite  a  critical,  justification. 


267 


LOWELL 


LOWELL 

I 

I  REMEMBER  hearing  Lowell  on  two  occasions.  One 
was  that  of  the  address  on  "The  Independent  in  Poli 
tics."  The  substance  was  rather  discouraged — as  any 
one  may  verify  by  referring  to  it  in  his  works.  He 
took  it  very  seriously  and  spoke  in  a  prophetic  strain 
and  with  the  prophetic  manner.  But  he  seemed  rather 
a  jaunty  Jeremiah,  and  one  could  not  feel  that  the 
country  of  which  he  was  such  a  genuine  product  could 
be  in  hopeless  estate.  The  other  occasion  was  a  dinner 
in  aid  of  the  American  School  at  Athens,  when  he 
spoke  extempore  and  must  have  been  at  his  best.  It 
was  on  occasions,  great  or  small,  in  spoken  or  written 
poetry  or  prose  production,  that  he  was,  I  imagine,  at 
his  best.  His  speech  was  the  happiest,  easiest,  most 
graceful  conceivable,  with  just  the  right  proportion  of 
play  to  seriousness,  the  ideal  combination  of  ingredients 
for  a  post-prandial  confection.  I  recall  an  anecdote 
with  which  he  began.  He  had  been  present  at  a  large 
political  meeting  in  England  somewhere,  Manchester 
perhaps,  where  Gladstone  was  to  speak.  The  hall  was 
packed  and  the  air  stifling.  For  some  reason  it  was 
impossible  to  open  the  windows,  which  were  very  high, 
and  one  had  to  be  broken.  It  was  feared  that  the  noise 

271 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

would  startle  the  audience  and  the  Mayor  stepped  for 
ward  to  explain  what  was  proposed.  The  audience, 
however,  had  not  assembled  to  listen  to  the  Mayor  and 
overwhelmed  him  with  cries  of  " Gladstone,"  "Glad 
stone!"  At  last  the  misconceived  and  infuriated  official 
restored  silence  by  shouting  at  the  top  of  his  lungs: 
"I'm  not  going  to  make  a  speech;  I've  got  something 
to  say  !"  Lowell  had  something  to  say;  and  it  was  not 
merely  the  announcement  of  a  gift  to  the  Athens 
school  or  some  such  practical  matter,  to  which  his 
exordium  referred.  He  had  a  great  deal  to  say  always 
on  such  occasions — at  least  for  such  occasions.  He 
was  pithy  without  baldness  and  full  without  prolixity. 
He  never  said  too  much,  or  said  what  he  had  to  say  with 
too  much  gravity.  His  manner,  in  short,  was  perfection ; 
but  the  real  substance  that  his  felicity  of  presentation 
clothed  counted  for  still  more.  Curtis  was  perhaps  a 
rival,  though  I  think  Curtis  was  a  shade  forensic  for 
the  genre,  but  Lowell  had  no  others  among  his  country 
men  and  in  his  own  day,  I  am  quite  sure.  And  in 
England  his  unexampled  popularity  was  very  largely 
due  to  this  gift.  During  his  official  residence  in  Lon 
don  he  was  in  prodigious  demand  on  all  occasions  that 
afforded  an  opportunity  for  its  exercise.  His  literary 
reputation,  the  piquancy  of  pardoning  "The  Biglow 
Papers,"  even  his  personal  charm  and  tact  in  more  inti 
mate  intercourse  probably  counted  for  less. 

It  is  a  great  gift — particularly  rare  in  first-class  men, 
perhaps,  and  yet  to  be  found  in  its  perfection  in  first- 
class  men  alone.  Hence,  Lowell's  distinction  in  its 

272 


LOWELL 

possession  and  exercise.  Both  branches  of  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  race  have  the  oratorical  tradition  and  with  them 
at  all  events  the  post-prandial  phase  is  the  latest  in  the 
evolution  of  eloquence  as  an  art.  At  the  present  day 
set  speeches  are  surely  less  savored.  And  no  other  art 
is  surer  of  instant  and  enthusiastic  appreciation.  It  is 
so  popular  that  its  exercise  has  become  epidemic  and 
there  are  already  signs  of  its  decadence  in  its  decline 
into  the  perfunctory  and  its  vulgarization  by  the  in 
expert.  So  soon  as  the  practice  of  any  art  becomes 
universal  this  decline  inevitably  ensues.  When  everyone 
practises  it,  the  mass  of  its  production  must  be  com 
mon;  and  commonness  in  excess  is  a  solvent  that  sets 
free  the  elements  of  energy  for  new  combinations.  But 
whatever  forebodings  we  may  have  as  to  its  future,  there 
can  be  no  gainsaying  that,  taken  with  its  extension  and 
congener  of  the  occasional  performance  of  all  kinds, 
this  is  an  art  not  only  of  integral  dignity  but  of  unique 
character  and  satisfactions.  Not  the  most  important, 
but  the  most  characteristic  achievement  of  an  artist 
is  the  best  guide  to  the  essential  elements  of  his  person 
ality.  And  if  Lowell  was  in  general  at  his  best  in 
improvization — if  in  a  word  his  occasional  performance 
in  prose  and  poetry,  was,  in  general,  more  unrivalled 
than,  in  general,  his  other  productions,  and  the  fore 
most  American  man  of  letters  was  also  the  first  after- 
dinner  orator  of  his  time,  it  was  in  virtue  of  two  or 
three  cardinal  facts  of  his  constitutional  make-up. 


273 


AFRICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

II 

Of  these  the  chief  I  take  to  have  been  a  certain 
representative  rather  than  individual  turn  of  mind. 
He  illustrated  on  occasions  of  all  kinds  what  he  himself 
says  the  public  asks  of  the  poet,  namely,  to  express  for 
it  its  own  feelings.  It  is  not  perhaps  a  comprehensive 
or  exacting  demand  to  make  of  the  poet — at  least  of  the 
poet  of  a  different  strain  from  Lowell's — but  it  is  pre 
cisely  the  one  made  of  the  public  speaker.  Lowell  an 
swered  it  amply.  He  felt  as  others  do,  only  more 
consciously — more  categorically.  He  expressed  what 
others  think,  but  with  more  energy.  He  was  not  an 
original  but  an  independent  thinker.  He  had  the  kind 
of  independence  which  even  in  reflecting  it  makes  its 
own  the  general  consensus.  He  did  his  own  thinking, 
but  its  results  were  as  recognizably  reasonable  as  its 
processes  were  placid.  In  other  words,  his  idiosyn 
crasy  lay  not  in  his  mind  but  in  his  character.  His 
reference  to  himself  in  "A  Fable  for  Critics"  as  ad 
dicted  to  "isms"  and  eccentricities  is  a  complete  mis 
conception — cleverly  misleading,  it  might  be  called, 
in  view  of  the  anonymity  of  the  book,  but  for  the  fact 
of  his  lack  of  self-consciousness.  Such  self-conscious 
ness  as  he  had  was  at  least  not  self-scrutiny.  It  was 
certainly  never  paralyzing  nor  even  disconcerting.  It 
was  clothed  in  the  complacence  born  of  the  most  re 
assuring  conviction  in  the  world,  that  of  being  in  es 
sential  harmony  with  others.  He  beamed  and  ex 
panded  in  a  confidence  free  from  the  fear  of  confutation 

274 


LOWELL 

or  even  contradiction.  The  rare  controversial  note  in  his 
writings  is  always  superficially  perverse  and  piquant, 
not  fundamentally  argumentative.  He  does  not  in  fact 
argue,  but  enounces.  He  is  never  either  stimulated 
or  embarrassed  by  "the  other  side."  There  was  for 
him  in  general  no  "other  side,"  and  indeed  oftenest 
in  his  case  there  is  not,  for  even  when  he  is  most  polemic 
he  is  fired  by  those  sure  convictions  attending  little  else 
so  infallibly  as  the  slaying  of  the  slain.  The  function 
is  a  most  important  one,  since  nothing  is  more  undesir 
able  than  their  resurrection,  to  which  there  is  always  a 
tendency.  But  the  inclination  for  it  is  a  didactic  and 
conservative  one,  quite  inconsistent  with  the  exploring 
instinct  of  the  iconoclast. 

Lowell's  "radicalism"  in  politics,  in  social  matters, 
on  subjects  theological,  historical  and  literary,  was 
practically  and  personally  conservative,  since  it  was  the 
established  attitude  of  his  sufficing — and  self-sufficing 
— circle.  To  be  an  abolitionist,  a  "rationalist,"  a  theo 
retical  romanticist,  was  for  him  almost  a  consequence  of 
ancestry,  tradition  and  circumstance.  Following  a 
legitimated  radical  programme  is  not  uncongenial  to  the 
whig  temperament.  Of  the  extravagances  due  to  the 
temperamentally  radical  with  which  every  New  Eng- 
lander  in  Lowell's  youth  and  early  manhood  was  famil 
iar,  no  one  has  said  sharper  and  saner  things  than  he. 
He  was  himself  eminently  sane  and  sound.  His  poise, 
indeed,  is  his  chief  distinction,  and  it  is  a  great  one.  He 
liked  whatever  was  sure  and  wholesome  and  eulogized 
it  on  all  occasions  with  the  zest  of  the  discoverer.  He 

275 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

might  make  a  willing  concession  now  and  then  to  the 
popular  demand  for  the  idiosyncratic  in  the  way  of  per 
sonal  aspect  or  attire,  just  as  he  frolicked  and  sported 
with  quips  and  puns  in  his  writing,  but  otherwise  than 
superficially  he  was  even  in  his  youth  a  very  sedate 
enfant  terrible.  The  fundamental  quality  of  his  mind 
is  as  practical  and  conservative  as  its  lighter  moods  are 
playful.  It  seems  to  have  absolutely  no  adventurous 
or  interrogative  side,  and  irresponsible  as  are  many  of  its 
expressions,  they  are  but  the  sparkle  and  ripple  on  a 
very  staidly  flowing  current.  Even  his  irresponsibili 
ties  and  looseness,  his  superlatives  and  sweeping  state 
ments  are  due  to  limitation,  rather  than  to  enterprise, 
of  thought.  One  can  hardly  "place"  him  in  the  same 
environment  with  Emerson.  His  passions,  too,  may  be 
summed  up  in  patriotism,  books  and  nature,  in  which 
there  is  as  little  that  deflects  as  there  is  that  is  dif 
ferentiating.  And  probably  the  residence  of  a  man's 
real  passions  in  the  realm  of  the  abstract  is  rather  a 
bond  than  a  bar  between  him  and  his  fellows,  even 
those  who  reserve  that  region  for  their  ideal  ones  alone 
— on  the  principle,  perhaps,  that  the  priest  wins  more 
confidence  than  the  practitioner.  Add  to  these  vari 
ous  elements  fostering  intellectual  commerce,  to  this 
representative  turn  of  mind,  a  sterling  character  that 
gives  it  body  and  substance  and  a  remarkable  faculty 
of  expression  that  gives  it  definition,  and  one  can  con 
ceive  no  better  equipment  and  instrument  for  the  ad 
mirable  art  of  telling  people  on  any  special  occasion,  on 
a  high  plane  and  in  an  elevated,  an  exquisite  or  an 

276 


LOWELL 

energetic  way,  as  may  be  required,  precisely  what  they 
wish  to  hear. 

Other  auxiliary  qualities  to  this  end  were  Lowell's 
ingrained  cleverness  and  his  extraordinary  personal 
charm.  Cleverness  and  personal  charm  are  qualities 
that  are — perhaps  ominously — extremely  attractive  to 
contemporary  appreciation.  Nothing  is  more  envied 
in  the  living.  Nothing  finds  prompter  interment  with 
their  bones.  Cleverness  cloys  too  quickly  to  be  an 
element  of  abiding  satisfaction  in  their  "  works."  And 
personal  charm  is  almost  inseparable  from  personal 
presence.  The  writers  who — like  Lamb  and  Thack 
eray — establish  it  in  their  writings  as  a  vital  and  pre 
servative  force,  are  very  few.  Lowell  was  immensely 
clever.  "A  Fable  for  Critics"  is  a  youthful  master 
piece — youthful  enough  in  some  of  its  criticism,  but 
an  extraordinary  jeu  d'esprit  and  so  individual  as  to 
remain,  with  parts  of  "The  Biglow  Papers,"  his  most 
characteristic,  as  the  "Commemoration  Ode"  is  his 
most  consummate,  production.  He  was  always  ex 
traordinarily  ready.  Whether  the  occasion  were  grave 
or  gay,  serious  or  sportive,  it  never  found  him  at  fault. 
To  unveil  a  monument,  or  respond  to  a  toast,  or  conse 
crate  a  festival,  or  cap  an  epigram,  and  each  in  ideal 
fashion,  he  was  equally  prepared.  Cleverness  was  the 
state  in  which  habitually  his  faculties  dwelt,  not  a 
mental  exercise  or  phase.  And  it  found  its  most  con 
genial  expression  in  pleasantry  and  playfulness.  It 
was  not  quite,  perhaps,  what  Schiller  had  in  mind  in  as 
serting  that  "  the  last  perfection  of  our  qualities  is  when 

277 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

their  activity,  without  ceasing  to  be  sure  and  earnest, 
becomes  sport."  In  Lowell,  one  is  tempted  rather  to 
say,  such  was  the  inveteracy  of  his  cleverness,  the  last 
perfection  of  his  qualities  was  when  their  activity  with 
out  ceasing  to  be  sport  became  sure  and  earnest.  For 
his  cleverness,  though  extreme  and  even  at  times  ex 
cessive,  is  never  sophisticated,  rarely  even  subtle.  It  is 
always  frank  and  generally  gay.  He  began  with  high 
spirits  and  his  youthful  buoyancy  stood  by  him  to  the 
end.  His  biographers  record  periods  of  gloom,  even 
thoughts  of  suicide,  and  Mr.  Greenslet  finds  grounds 
for  the  belief  that  he  had  a  "dual  nature"  in  this  as 
in  other  respects.  It  is  not  unlikely.  Most  people 
have.  But  it  is  difficult  to  make  a  mystic  out  of  Lowell. 
One  may  as  easily  fancy  St.  Francis  in  Fanueil  Hall. 
He  had  his  seasons  of  melancholy,  but  normally  and 
for  tragically  abundant  cause.  There  is  no  more  the 
mystic,  than  there  is  a  morbid,  note  in  his  composition. 
Everything  of  the  kind  is  instinctively  antipathetic  to 
him.  Apparently  with  all  his  reading  he  never  read, 
at  least  sympathetically,  the  Scriptures  of  any  people. 
He  never  cites  the  Bible.  His  good  sense  sufficed  to 
assure  him  that 

" — you've  gut  to  git  up  airly 
Ef  you  want  to  take  in  God," 

and  the  apocalyptic  was  superfluous  to  him. 

At  all  events,  no  writer  of  anything  resembling  his 
bookish  and  scholarly  turn  ever  possessed  high  spirits 
in  any  such  degree,  as  no  writer  ever  so  cordially  con- 

278 


LOWELL 

joined  the  study  and  out-of-doors.  Among  writers 
of  distinction  we  should  have  to  go,  not  I  think  to  Mark 
Twain  and  Aristophanes  (the  coupling  is  Lowell's  own), 
who  mix  things  less,  but  to  Dickens  for  a  parallel  to 
his  irruptive  and  casual  gayeties  in  grave  context. 
Certainly  if  his  high  spirits  are  not  marked  by  the 
usual  exuberance,  they  sometimes  show  as  unmistakably 
in  whimsicality  and  extravagance,  however  exhibited 
in  playful  rather  than  in  boisterous  guise.  They  do 
not  lead  him  astray,  but  they  are  constantly  taking  him 
aside.  He  is  not  their  slave,  but  they  are  his  plaything. 
When  they  are  constrained  and  directed  to  an  artistic 
2nd,  as  in  "A  Fable  for  Critics"  or  "The  Biglow 
Papers" — in  the  prefaces  to  which  indeed  they  become 
sedate  enough,  even  solemn,  one  may  remark  without 
fear  of  flippancy — they  serve  as  excellent  stimulus  to 
sustained  effort.  But  when,  as  is  sometimes  the  case, 
they  are  the  desultory  and  yet  deliberate  accentuation 
of  his  gayety,  his  general  enjoue  manner,  they  are  less 
to  the  purpose.  "Nothing,"  he  says  rather  hardly 
apropos  of  Fletcher,  "grows  mouldy  so  soon  as  mere 
fun,  the  product  of  animal  spirits."  And  we  should  be 
tempted  to  call  some  of  Lowell's  sallies  "mere  fun"  if 
the  high  spirits  from  which  they  spring  were  not  rather 
mental  than  animal,  and  if  they  were  not  so  clearly 
stamped  with  his  indisputable  cleverness.  They  may 
be  strained,  of  inappropriate  tone,  of  doubtful  taste, 
distracting  rather  than  contributory  or  even  decorative; 
there  is  none,  it  would  be  safe  to  wager,  that  is  not  truly 
however  studiedly  clever,  though  sometimes,  it  is  true, 

279 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

what  one  feels  impelled  to  call  demonstrably  so.  But 
cleverness  is  largely  a  matter  of  expression,  and  expres 
sion  is  but  one  element  of  style,  which  though  no  doubt 
the  great  preservative  of  thought  is  in  turn  reciprocally 
dependent  upon  it  for  its  own  endurance  and  vitality. 
Take  for  example  this  delightful  sentence:  "In  what 
may  be  given  me  to  say  I  shall  be  obliged  to  trust  chiefly 
to  a  memory  which  at  my  time  of  life  is  gradually  becom 
ing  one  of  her  own  reminiscences,  and  is  forced  to  com 
pound  as  best  she  may  with  her  inexorable  creditor, 
Oblivion."  That  is  Lowell's  cleverness  at  its  best,  clev 
erness  with  the  addition  of  poetic  and  personal  charm. 
But  if  one  has  only  ten  pages  for  an  appreciation  of 
Coleridge,  it  may  be  said  to  sacrifice,  so  far  as  it  goes, 
the  permanent  to  the  occasional  note.  What  gives 
the  address  value  is  the  excellent  characterization  of 
Coleridge's  picturesqueness,  and  then,  too,  it  gains,  I 
think,  from  the  necessity  of  making  it  rapid  "generali 
zation,"  as  Lowell  calls  it,  pertinent  to  the  unveiling 
of  a  bust  in  Westminster.  Take  on  the  other  hand  the 
rather  elaborate  essay  by  no  means  "occasionally" 
evoked  on  the  now  forgotten  poet  Percival,  which  leans 
entirely  for  support  and  even  countenance  on  the  es 
sayist's  cleverness.  Among  us  when  Percival  wrote, 
he  says,  "to  write  a  hundred  blank  verses  was  to  be 
immortal,  till  somebody  else  wrote  a  hundred  and  fifty 
blanker  ones.  .  .  .  Unhappily  Percival  took  it  all 
quite  seriously.  There  was  no  praise  too  ample  for  the 
easy  elasticity  of  his  swallow,"  etc.  Of  cleverness  of 
this  sort,  in  which  Lowell  abounds,  the  interest  evapo- 

280 


LOWELL 

rates  with  the  outwearing  of  the  subject  if  not  with  the 
occasion  itself. 

It  was,  however,  a  constituent  probably  rather  than 
merely  an  ally  of  his  great  personal  charm,  which  is 
universally  attested.  Mr.  Howells  has  borne  affection 
ate  as  well  as  discriminating  testimony  to  it,  and  Mr. 
James's  essay  on  him  is  eloquent  witness  to  its  power 
to  color  and  even  gild  the  appreciation  of  a  critical 
faculty  far  otherwise  penetrating  than  Lowell's  own. 
To  have  inspired  this  remarkable  portrait  the  sitter  must 
have  been  richly  endowed  with  qualities  that  the  reader, 
familiar  only  with  his  writings,  can  only  infer.  Evi 
dently  he  was  the  best  of  company  and  in  the  best  of  com 
pany.  His  sincerity  and  dignity  of  character,  his  accom 
plished  scholarship,  his  frankness  and  optimism,  his 
good  sense  and  appreciation,  his  wit  and  extraordinary 
powers  of  expression,  must  have  made  intimacy  with 
him  ideal  and  mere  acquaintance  a  delight.  He  was 
literally  but  not  overpoweringly  a  brilliant  conversa 
tionalist,  and  if  he  "did  most  of  the  talking,"  others- 
Thackeray,  Longfellow,  Clough,  and  Edmund  Quincy 
on  one  recorded  occasion— were  more  than  content  to 
listen.  One  certainly  argues  a  considerable  egoism  from 
his  writings,  but  no  one  seems  ever  to  have  minded  or 
even  marked  it  in  his  talk,  and  even  in  his  books  it  never 
excludes  the  most  altruistic  admirations.  He  was 
geniality  itself,  and  though  undoubtedly  what  used  to 
be  called  a  Brahmin— at  least  by  the  Pariahs  of  the 
period — his  sympathies  were  undoubtedly,  in  a  human 
if  not  in  an  intellectual  sense,  catholic  and  active.  His 

281 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

circle,  however,  was  not  large  and  those  outside  it 
could  more  easily  perceive,  perhaps,  than  those  within 
it,  that  what,  together  with  his  cleverness,  constituted 
for  these  latter  an  essential  part  of  his  personal  charm 
was  his  clearly  defined  possession  of  the  temperament 
of  the  dilettante.  Mr.  James  states  the  fact,  with 
extraordinary  searchingness,  though  with,  of  course, 
the  slightly  august  tone  of  the  memorial  "tribute."  He 
regards  his  career  "as  in  the  last  analysis  a  tribute  to 
the  dominion  of  style.  This  is  the  idea,"  he  continues, 
"  that  to  my  sense  his  name  most  promptly  evokes.  He 
carried  style — the  style  of  literature — into  regions  in 
which  we  rarely  look  for  it :  into  politics,  of  all  places  in 
the  world,  into  diplomacy,  into  stammering,  civic  din 
ners,  and  ponderous  anniversaries,  into  letters  and  notes 
and  telegrams,  into  every  turn  of  the  hour — absolutely 
into  conversation,  where  indeed  it  freely  disguised  itself 
as  intensely  colloquial  wit."  One  could  not  better 
describe  the  activities  of  the  true  dilettante  tempera 
ment. 

Its  conjunction  in  Lowell  with  his  incontestable 
and  even  salient  Americanism,  is  decidedly  piquant. 
There  is  not  an  exotic  tinge  in  his  nature,  and  if  he  is 
not  representatively  national  in  the  sense  in  which  he 
himself  called  Lincoln  "new  birth  of  our  new  soil,  the 
first  American,"  it  is  not  because  in  being  even  more 
sectional  he  is  less  native.  Yet  one  would  say  off-hand 
that  the  American  genius  was  incompatible  with  the 
dilettante  temperament.  But  really  Lowell  was  pre 
cisely  the  product  reflection  would  predicate  of  its 

282 


LOWELL 

American  modification.  The  dilettante  is  not  a  type 
especially  distinguished  by  originality,  it  is  true,  and 
ordinarily  originality  is  an  essential  and  predominant 
element  of  what  we  think  we  are,  of  what — more  opti 
mistically  perhaps  than  discriminatingly — we  mean  in 
calling  anything  characteristically  American.  But  it 
is  in  the  solution  of  new  problems  that  our  very  striking 
originality  is  mainly  developed.  Like  the  "new 
duties"  taught,  in  Lowell's  phrase,  by  "new  occasions," 
it  is  the  product  of  necessity  and  opportunity,  prob 
ably,  rather  than  due  to  the  climate  or  the  predilection 
of  Providence.  We  have  other  characteristics  that  we 
share  with  no  other  people,  but  originality  is  not  one  of 
them;  our  invention  has  the  same  mother.  It  is  not 
remarkable,  therefore,  except  superficially,  that  Lowell 
should  have  been  so  genuine  an  American  and  so  gen 
uinely  a  dilettante.  But  we  may  say  that  the  paradox 
has  the  interest  of  novelty  and  that,  though  no  more 
originality  than  the  dilettante  type  calls  for  is  either 
usually  to  be  expected— in  the  field  of  letters— of  the 
American  genius,  or  to  be  found  in  Lowell,  he  was  a 
dilettante  of  an  original  type  in  being  so  thoroughly 
American.  He  had  the  disinterested  delight  in  the  de 
lectable  that  characterizes  the  dilettante  as  distinguished 
from  the  artist,  to  whom  the  delectable  is  material.  His 
singularity — as  a  dilettante,  not  as  an  American — con 
sists  in  his  being  attracted  by  the  elementary  quite  as 
much  as  by  the  differentiated.  His  milieu — which  was 
really,  in  the  large  sense,  the  lack  of  any — imposed  this 
upon  him  to  a  certain  extent,  of  course.  In  such  a  society 

283 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

as  ours,  without  variety  of  type  and  without  background, 
without  the  many  elements  that  Mr.  James  has  scrupu 
lously  catalogued  in  his  life  of  Hawthorne,  the  role  of 
the  dilettante  can  only  be  sincerely  played — and  sin 
cerity  was  one  of  Lowell's  cardinal  qualities — by  a 
nature  in  which  confidence,  eagerness,  ardor,  gener 
osity,  and  optimism  replace  the  sentimental,  sensitive, 
and  fastidious  instincts,  the  divining  and  discriminating 
faculties  that  are  less  disposed  to  see  sermons  in  stones 
and  good  in  everything  than  to  select  and  exclude.  The 
fact  that  he  carried  " style"  into  some  of  the  regions 
enumerated  by  Mr.  James — in  some  of  which  certainly 
his  " style"  savored  more  of  the  amateur  than  of  the 
connoisseur — both  denotes  and  defines  his  tempera 
ment,  shows  at  once  its  inveteracy  and  its  limitations. 


Ill 

Of  his  own  particular  environment,  to  which  he  was 
profoundly  attached  and  in  which  he  throve,  he  could 
nevertheless  take  a  properly  objective  view.  Whatever 
the  limitations  of  his  temperament,  his  mind,  which  was 
alertness  itself,  instantly  apprehended  the  suggestions 
of  culture,  though  his  own  culture,  which  was  eminent, 
was  as  idiosyncratic — quite  as  idiosyncratic — as  his 
personality.  "How  narrow  Boston  was!"  he  exclaims. 
"How  scant  a  pasture  it  offered  to  the  imagination." 
He  speaks  of  Allston,  "who  perished  slowly  of  inani 
tion  over  yonder  in  Cambridgeport,"  and  adds:  "That 
unfinished  Belshazzar  of  his  was  a  bitter  sarcasm  on 

284 


LOWELL 

our  self-conceit.  Among  us  it  was  unfinishable."  The 
implication  of  the  italicized  "  us  "  is  candid,  courageous, 
and  correct.  Lowell  himself  never  experienced  any 
such  difficulty.  His  work  could  be  produced  and  fin 
ished  to  its  last  potential  perfection  in  this  same  atmos 
phere,  in  which  he  found  something  intimately  conge 
nial.  He  even  took  it  with  him  on  his  travels,  and  was, 
even  in  Europe,  surrounded  with  the  Massachusetts 
aura.  He  had  his  books  and  he  had  his  public.  It 
is  probable  that  he  was  conscious  of  no  other  needs. 
His  acquisitiveness  was  among  the  most  preponderant 
of  his  mental  traits,  but  books  satisfied  its  cravings 
— which  does  not  seem  so  singular  when  we  remember 
his  enormous  consumption  of  them.  They  and  the 
society  of  Cambridge  and  Boston,  in  which  "Allston 
perished  slowly  of  inanition,"  sufficed  to  evoke  and 
polish  in  him  those  qualities  that  make  the  perfect  man 
of  the  world;  so  that  when  he  went  officially  to  Spain 
and  England  he  was  as  much  at  home  in  a  cosmopoli 
tan  society  as  he  was  in  Cambridge.  His  own  extreme 
personal  charm  and  innate  dignity  counted  largely,  of 
course,  in  the  distinguished  impression  he  made  abroad. 
But,  every  allowance  made  for  these,  it  is  particu 
larly — and  to  his  countrymen  it  must  remain  satisfac 
torily — notable  that  he  should  have  had  such  a  striking 
European  success  with  such  an  exclusively  American 
equipment. 

Books,  apparently,  can  accomplish  a  great  deal; 
books  in  sufficient  quantity,  the  best  books.  And  even 
books  that  come  more  or  less  strictly  under  the  head  of 

285 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

belles-lettres.  For  if  Lowell  had  any  other  equipment  as 
a  man  of  letters  than  belles-lettres,  taken  in  the  wider 
extension  of  the  term,  the  fact  does  not  appear  in  his 
writings.  Science,  theology,  art,  philosophy,  history, 
apparently  interested  him  in  a  very  subsidiary  degree. 
Never  was  such  conspicuous  culture  so  exclusively 
belletristic.  Mr.  James  says:  "  He  knew  his  Paris  as  he 
knew  all  his  subjects.  The  history  of  a  thing  was  what 
he  first  saw  in  it."  If  so,  they  never  passed  beyond  the 
states  of  seeing  and  knowing  into  feeling;  and  his 
"subjects'*  were  altogether  literary  "things."  Neither 
his  knowledge  of  Paris  nor  his  expertness  in  Old  French 
gave  him  any  independent  appreciation  of  France  or 
things  French,  at  any  rate,  with  reference  to  which  he 
always  utters  the  traditional  British  commonplaces. 
Tennyson  hardly  phrased  them  in  more  sharply  stereo 
typed  smugness.  The  great  facts  of  French  history  are 
still  for  him  the  massacre  of  St.  Bartholomew  and  the 
atrocities  of  the  Revolution.  "He  should  have  fought 
with  Nelson,"  as  Arnold  remarked  of  some  fanatic — an 
Englishman,  however.  And  of  any  special  acquaint 
ance  with  English  history  there  is  insufficient  trace  in  his 
books  to  account  for  Mr.  James's  further  statement: 
"He  had  studied  English  history  for  forty  years  in  the 
texts,  and  at  last  [on  becoming  minister  to  England]  he 
could  study  it  in  the  pieces  themselves,  could  handle 
and  verify  the  relics."  The  "texts"  Mr.  James  has 
in  mind  are  perhaps  literary  texts.  In  other  words, 
Lowell  had  studied  English  literature;  he  was  now  to 
"check"  it  by  a  stud"  of  English  life.  Possibly  so 

286 


LOWELL 

omnivorous  and  indefatigable  a  reader  had  read  Free 
man  and  Stubbs  and  Gardiner  as  well  as  Macaulay  and 
Froude,  Hume  and  Green.  But  certainly  neither 
English  history  nor  Continental,  ancient,  mediaeval, 
nor  modern,  deeply  interested  him  except  from  an 
extension  of  the  belletristic  point  of  view.  And  even 
from  this  point  of  view,  of  course,  far  less  than  it  did 
Macaulay,  Carlyle,  or  Arnold,  not  to  speak  of  such 
writers  as  Taine,  Scherer,  and  Sainte-Beuve,  of  the  value 
of  whose  " detective  method"  in  criticism,  indeed,  he 
expresses  doubts.  Less  even,  one  may  surely  say,  than 
Thackeray.  For,  in  spite  of  his  special  studies  of 
early  New  England,  if  there  is  a  passage  in  his  works 
resembling  the  impressive  and  illuminating  picture  of 
Europe  in  the  early  eighteenth  century  in  the  lecture 
on  George  I,  beginning  with  "  The  landscape  is  awful — " 
I  have  not  remarked  it. 

Mr.  James  speaks  of  him  as  "  steeped  in  history  and 
literature"  and  "redolent,  intellectually  speaking,"  of 
Italy  and  Spain.  But  what  he  means  appears  in  his 
next  sentence:  "He  had  lived  in  long  intimacy  with 
Dante  and  Cervantes  and  Calderon."  That  is  to  say, 
he  was  steeped  not  in  history  and  literature,  but  in 
literary  history  and  literature — nowadays,  at  all  events, 
an  unsatisfactory  infusion  for  producing  the  best  of  even 
literary  effects.  He  relied,  indeed,  even  for  the  illumina 
tion  of  literature  not  so  much  on  life  as  on  linguistics, 
and  the  literary  and  linguistic  pages  of  history,  which  is 
life  recorded,  monopolized  his  attention.  "As  Dante 
tells  us,"  he  says,  "St.  Francis  took  poverty  for  his 

287 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

bride."  He  does  indeed.  So  does  Francis  himself. 
So  for  that  matter  does  Giotto.  It  is,  in  fact,  a  cir 
cumstance  decidedly  not  divulged  by  Dante.  Such  a 
phrase  in  itself  implicitly  glosses  Mr.  James's  assertion 
that  Lowell  was  "steeped  in  history."  But  his  own 
words  are  explicit.  In  one  of  his  political  essays  there 
are  several  pages  of  express  depreciation  of  the  value  of 
history — much  in  the  vein  of  Colonel  Esmond's  senti 
mentally  sceptical  old  age,  except  in  being  more  sys 
tematic.  In  his  essay  on  Dante  he  says  that  "one  al 
most  gets  to  feel  as  if  the  chief  value  of  contemporary 
Italian  history  had  been  to  furnish  'the  Divine  Comedy* 
with  explanatory  foot-notes."  Indeed  he  quite  "gets 
to  feel"  so  when  the  momentum  of  hero-worship  carries 
him  on  to  the  statement:  "For  Italy,  Dante  is  the 
thirteenth  century."  One  thinks  of  what,  besides,  the 
thirteenth  century — the  century  of  Frederic  II,  and 
Innocent  III,  and  Giotto,  and  St.  Francis— really  was 
for  Italy,  "the  most  interesting,"  as  it  has  been  called, 
in  the  history  of  Christianity  after  its  primitive  age, 
"more  interesting  than  even  the  century  of  the  Reforma 
tion";  and  owing  not  to  Dante  but  to  Francis.  Else 
where,  too,  Lowell  speaks  of  Dante  as  having  been 
"produced"  by  the  fourteenth  century.  In  strict 
accuracy,  of  course,  he  would  have  done  better  to  have 
had  the  thirteenth  produce  him  and  let  him  be  for 
Italy  the  fourteenth.  And  nothing  could  be  more 
definite  than  Lowell's  association  of  history  with  the 
Dismal  Science  in  his  admirable  and  elevated  address 
on  the  two-hundred-and-fiftieth  anniversary  of  Harvard 

288 


LOWELL 

College.  "Give,"  he  says,  "give  to  History,  give  to 
Political  Economy  that  ample  verge  the  times  demand, 
but  with  no  detriment  to  those  liberal  Arts  which  have 
formed  open-minded  men  and  good  citizens  in  the  past, 
nor  have  lost  the  skill  to  form  them." 

As  a  philosophia  ultima  of  literary  phenomena,  that 
popularly  associated  with  Taine  and  Spencer  is  perhaps 
discredited  in  so  far  as  genius  escapes  its  explanations. 
And  it  is  at  once  a  mark  of  distinction  and  of  naivete' 
in  Lowell  that,  in  criticism,  he  occupied  himself  mainly 
with  genius.  As  a  subject,  one  may  say  in  racy  cur 
rent  phrase  of  which  he  was  fond,  the  best  was  good 
enough  for  him.  But  however  it  be  with  the  explana 
tion,  for  the  illumination,  the  appreciation,  of  genius  the 
historical  method  is  invaluable.  Between  genius  thus 
illuminated  and  genius  just  merely  accepted  as  an  un- 
differentiated  prodigy,  there  is  a  prodigious  difference 
in  mere  appreciation.  Genius  itself,  in  fact,  has  come 
to  be  looked  at  a  little  more  narrowly  than  heretofore. 
There  is  commonly  felt,  to  begin  with,  that  there  is  less 
of  it.  I  remember  Mr.  Winslow  Homer,  who  certainly 
should  know,  once  remarking :  "  Genius  is  so  rare  there 
is  no  use  talking  about  it."  Lowell  was  particularly 
fond  of  talking  about  it,  and  rehearsing  the  accepted 
views  about  its  essential  difference  from  talent.  Cer 
tainly  such  a  difference  exists  and  we  shall  never  know 
what  precisely  it  is.  But  the  Germans  may  be  relied 
upon  never  to  let  us  forget  that  its  character  is  mystic. 
And  a  writer  like  Lowell,  in  whose  temperament  there 
is  so  little  mysticism,  becomes  conventional  and  super- 

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AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

ficial  when  he  presses  the  matter  no  further  than  he 
does.  His  hearty  and  insistent  adoration  of  Shake 
speare,  at  every  opportunity  of  mentioning  whose  name 
that  he  encounters  or  can  contrive  he  performs  a  little 
act  of  genial  genuflexion,  ends  by  fatiguing  us.  He  has 
certainly  said  some  very  interesting  things,  in  detail, 
about  him,  without,  however,  fixing  them  very  securely 
in  one's  memory,  but  his  admiration  takes  on,  finally, 
an  aspect  of  adulation.  One  recalls  Voltaire's  ex 
clamation  of  a  greater  even  than  Shakespeare:  "I 
pray  you  never  let  me  hear  that  man's  name  again!" 
It  is  always  genuine,  but  Lowell  had  a  "genius"  for 
being  perfunctory  and  genuine  at  the  same  time — such 
was  his  zest  for  the  sure  and  sound.  It  is  true  that 
"others  abide  our  question"  and  Shakespeare  does  not, 
but  other  than  lecture-room  purposes  do  not  demand 
constant  iteration  of  what  is  best  condensed  in  a  sonnet. 
In  all  Lowell's  references  to  or  formal  consideration  of 
Shakespeare  nothing  so  illuminating  is  to  be  found  as 
Arnold's:  "There  is  but  one  name  for  such  writing  as 
that  [citing  a  couple  of  lines]  if  Shakespeare  had  signed 
it  a  thousand  times— it  is  detestable.  And  it  is  too  fre 
quent  in  Shakespeare."  Or  his  statement:  "He  is  the 
richest,  the  most  wonderful,  the  most  powerful,  the 
most  delightful  of  poets :  he  is  not  altogether,  nor  even 
eminently,  an  artist."  Even  Carlyle's  humorous  defini 
tion  of  "superiority  of  intellect"  as  "on  the  whole" 
Shakespeare's  "distinguishing  characteristic"  gets  us 
nearer  a  satisfactory  answer  of  "our  question"  than 
repeated  obeisances  to  his  "genius." 

290 


LOWELL 

It  is  extraordinary  at  first  to  an  Anglo-Saxon  reader 
to  note  how  little  reference  to  genius  there  is  in  French 
criticism,  how  exclusively  a  writer's  "talent"  is  con 
sidered  in  it.  And  extraordinary,  a  little  later  per 
haps,  to  observe  how  satisfactorily  "  talent"  answers 
the  purpose  in  most  cases.  Undoubtedly  this  is  due 
to  the  presence  in  the  French  critic's  mind  of  the  penum 
bra  as  well  as  the  shadow  of  his  subject,  of  the  life  as 
well  as  the  books  of  a  people  or  a  period,  of  circum 
stances  as  well  as  essence,  and — in  the  consideration 
of  the  classic,  of  such  themes  as,  so  greatly  to  his  credit, 
Lowell's  were — of  history  as  well  as  literature,  of  trans 
actions  as  well  as  texts.  Against  a  visualized  background 
of  time  and  space,  any  one  figure  seems  less  exceptional 
and  inexplicable  than  genius  is  by  definition  required 
to  be;  more  familiarity  with  their  history,  for  example, 
would  have  prevented  Lowell  from  asserting  that  "the 
genius  of  Motley  has  revealed  to  us  "  the  distinction  of 
the  Dutch.  But  apparently  he  never  read  any  French 
to  much  purpose,  except  Old  French,  and  this  but  con 
firmed  him  in  his  concentration  upon  linguistics.  For 
the  great  movements,  migrations,  vicissitudes  of  the 
march  of  mankind — its  transformations,  enterprises, 
and  achievements — the  grandiose  drama  of  war  and 
peace,  the  rise  and  fall  of  tyranny  and  freedom,  faith 
and  philosophy,  the  birth,  development,  and  decay  of 
institutions — social,  political,  and  religious — the  spec 
tacle  foreshortened  in  time,  in  a  word,  of  general  human 
activity  caught  and  fixed  in  the  multifariously  embroid 
ered  web  of  history,  he  cared  less,  to  judge  from  its 

291 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

reflection  and  echo  in  his  works,  than  any  other  writer 
of  his  indisputably  high  rank  that  one  could  readily 
name.  The  service  rendered  criticism  by  this  its 
connotation  and  collateral  re-enforcement  is,  as  I  have 
said,  incontestable.  The  work  of  every  important 
modern  critic  relies  on  it — to  an  extent  that  gives  its 
absence  in  Lowell  a  slightly  old-fashioned  air  for  works 
on  so  high  a  plane  of  scholarship  and  intelligence.  His 
essays,  in  a  word,  are  not  historically  enriched  nor  the 
product  of  a  mind  thus  enriched.  They  have  a  very 
particular,  a  very  bookish,  and  in  consequence  a  rather 
restricted  quality,  for  all  their  humanity,  their  elevated 
bonhomie  and  unaffected  cordiality. 

The  matter  is  not  one  of  erudition  at  all,  but  of  culture. 
Lowell's  erudition  was  great — even  conspicuous,  being, 
though  always  assimilated,  always  comfortably  if  not 
complacently  displayed.  Mr.  Greenslet,  his  latest  biog 
rapher,  whose  Life  is,  critically,  a  work  of  altogether 
unusual  distinction,  asserts  that  his  scholarship  was 
not  up  to  current  standards.  One  understands  what 
is  meant,  but  is  a  little  impatient  at  having  this  sense 
of  the  term  scholarship  taken  for  granted.  Lovers  of 
literature  would  gladly  have  it  remain  esoteric  a  little 
longer,  and  instinctively  shrink  from  the  time  when 
"we  shall  all  go  into  the  drab."  One  would  gladly 
postpone  yet  for  a  brief  season  the  era  of  specialism, 
and  views  with  misgiving  the  no  doubt  inevitable  in 
vasion  of  barbarian  hordes  from  without  the  confines 
of  the  empire  of  letters.  The  province  of  history  has 
already  been  overrun  and  the  expert  is  established  within 

292 


LOWELL 

its  stronghold,  haughtier  than  Alaric  or  Attila  in  his 
contempt  for  the  superficialities  and  shallownesses  pow 
erless  to  resist  him.  Belles-lettres  may,  however,  hold 
out  a  little  longer  before  it  is  transformed  into  scientific 
feudalism  or  declines  in  Byzantine  decadence.  The 
scholar  should  be  an  authority  upon,  as  well  as  accom 
plished  in  his  subject.  Inspiration  by  its  spirit  will  not 
atone  for  ignorance  of  its  letter.  True;  alas!  there  is 
no  possibility  of  robbing  an  ideal  of  so  reasonable  a  re 
quirement.  But  there  are  practical  difficulties.  Por- 
son  on  his  deathbed  sighed  ruefully  that  he  should  have 
confined  himself  to  the  dative  case.  Had  he  done  so, 
however,  scholarship  would  have  lost  something. 
Mere  count  of  heads  shows  that  there  are  not  enough 
Persons  to  go  around  when  the  number  of  dative  case 
equivalents  is  considered.  Furthermore,  he  never  could 
have  learned  much  about  the  dative  case  itself  by  con 
fining  himself  to  it.  No  man,  says  Arnold,  knows  even 
his  Bible  who  knows  only  it.  And  Professor  James 
sets  it  down  as  "a  common  platitude "  that  "a  complete 
acquaintance  with  anything,  however  small,  would  re 
quire  a  knowledge  of  the  entire  universe  " — "  that  tempt 
ing  range  of  relevancies,"  as  George  Eliot  calls  it.  But 
even  a  knowledge  of  the  entire  universe  would  not  ob 
viate  the  greater  obstacle  in  the  path  to  literary  dis 
tinction  of  the  expert  in  literature.  He  would  still 
need  what  Bacon  prescribes  for  the  portraitist  who 
would  enhance  nature — "a  kind  of  felicity,"  namely. 
Bentley's  scholarship  will  hardly  be  impugned,  though 
he  might  perhaps  judiciously  have  restricted  its  range. 

293 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

But  even  had  he  done  so,  no  amount  of  concentration 
could  have  prevented  the  perpetration  of  his  revised 
text  of  " Paradise  Lost" — a  veritable  pharos  erected 
on  the  rocks  of  learning  to  warn  the  voyaging  expert 
through  yet  "undiscovered  deeps  of  time." 

Lowell  certainly  did  not  resemble  the  Casaubons  of 
former,  or  their  brisk  analogues  of  present,  times.  No 
one  would  have  been  readier  than  he  to  disclaim  expert 
pretensions;  quite  destitute  of  deference  as  a  coloring 
characteristic  of  his  nature,  such  an  attitude  as  he  as 
sumes  toward  Professor  Child,  for  example,  about 
Chaucer,  is  witness  enough  of  this.  His  temper  was 
as  little  authoritative  as  it  was  conspicuously  com 
placent.  But  in  Old  French,  as  to  a  certain  extent  in 
linguistics  more  generally,  he  was  an  authority;  and 
though  quicquid  agunt  homines  (within  his  own  field) 
interested  him  too  vivaciously  to  permit  him  to  pursue 
to  its  documentary  fastnesses  other  game  that  he  never 
theless  delighted  to  hunt,  it  is  misleading  to  lay  any 
stress  on  the  deficiencies  of  his  scholarship  or  to  im 
peach  the  genuineness  of  his  truly  scholarly  tastes.  He 
was  at  least  a  scholar  in  the  tested  and  traditional  sense. 
That  his  "results"  were  not  more  important  from  the 
standpoint  of  the  specialist  does  not  make  it  the  less 
erroneous  to  obscure  his  scholarship,  which  was  re 
markable,  by  emphasizing  his  culture,  which  in  certain 
respects  was  restricted.  He  was  a  distinguished  ex 
ample  of  what  he  himself  calls  " liberal  scholarship" — 
a  term  with  as  definite  and  laudable  a  meaning  as  that 
of  the  liberal  arts.  His  learning  was  great  and  varied. 

294 


LOWELL 

His  reading  was  enormous.  He  read  as  Chinese  candi 
dates  read  their  classics  and  commentaries — all  his  life 
long,  usually  for  many  hours  at  a  stretch,  often  for  more 
than  the  day-laborer  toils.  And  he  read  because  he 
liked  to— not,  as  a  rule,  one  guesses,  as  specific  prepara 
tion  for  work  of  his  own.  When  he  did  it  did  not  always 
bring  him  good  luck.  He  says  that  he  expressly  read 
over  again,  seriatim,  all  of  Thoreau's  works  before 
writing  of  him,  and  certainly  he  did  so  to  small  purpose. 
As  a  rule,  we  may  be  sure,  he  read  to  satisfy  his  curiosity 
— the  curiosity  of  the  scholar  as  well  as  that  of  the  dilet 
tante.  However  desultory,  too,  his  reading  may  ap 
pear  to  pedantry,  it  was,  owing  to  his  curiosity,  thor 
oughgoing  if  not  systematic.  He  was  as  persistent,  as 
patient,  in  it  as  is  possible  only  to  a  man  who  is  follow 
ing  his  bent.  There  is  no  other  explanation  of  ten  con 
secutive  hours  devoted  to  "Barbour's  Brus"!  His 
energy,  his  high  spirits,  his  debonair  possession  of  a 
reasonably  thick  integument  to  shield  his  nerves  and 
allay  irritability,  all  contributed  to  the  inveteracy  of 
his  favorite  pursuit.  He  read  everything  except  the 
inept  and  negligible;  and  everything,  ancient  and 
modern,  in  its  own  tongue.  Dulness  itself  had  no  ter 
rors  for  him.  He  read  Gower  as  well  as  Chaucer,  Joel 
Barlow  as  well  as  Homer.  He  delighted  as  much  in 
his  "Library  of  Old  Authors"  — a  formidable  array! — 
as  in  the  less  recondite  and  better-remembered  books 
that  filled  his  ample  shelves.  Not  a  scholar!  Le  moyen, 
as  the  French  say,  for  such  a  tremendous  bookman  not 
to  be. 

295 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

But  the  truth  is  that  Lowell's  eminently  scholarly 
tastes  were  wholly  directed  by  his  temperamental  pre 
dilections,  and  he  followed  these,  I  think,  with  an  en 
thusiastic  docility  that  limited  his  culture  to  a  degree 
unfortunate  for  the  importance  and  endurance  of  much 
of  his  work  in  prose.  His  preferences  despotically 
dictated  his  preoccupation,  which  was  rather  exclusively 
with  linguistics,  taking  the  term  of  course  in  its  widest  ex 
tension.  "His  linguistic  sense,"  Mr.  James  says  truly, 
"  is  perhaps  the  thing  his  reputation  may  best  be  trusted 
to  rest  upon."  And  he  accounts  for  this  admirably  in 
saying  further,  "He  had  no  experimental  sympathies 
and  no  part  of  him  was  traitor  to  the  rest,"  and  that 
"this  temper  drove  the  principle  of  subtlety  in  his  in 
telligence  ...  to  take  refuge  in  one  particular  .  .  . 
corner,"  linguistics,  namely.  One  could  not  more  deli 
cately  suggest  limitations  or  better  indicate  the  quality 
of  mind  of  the  true  dilettante  innocent  of  the  artist's 
constructional  purpose,  though  the  dilettante  in  thor 
oughly  American  disguise — robust, genial,  confident,  and 
masculine,  without  "experimental  sympathies." 

To  his  lack  of  experimental  sympathies,  too,  must  be 
ascribed  his  apparent  insensitiveness  to  the  plastic  arts. 
Of  course  I  do  not  mean  that  he  was  blind  to  their 
beauty,  feeling  sure  as  I  do  that  the  poetic  strain  is  the 
dominant  one  in  his  equipment.  But  he  did  not  take 
them  in  the  least  seriously.  There  is  extraordinarily 
little  reference  to  them  in  his  works,  which  fact,  how 
ever,  is  less  indicative  than  the  conjoined  freedom  and 
fatuity  of  such  reference  as  there  is.  It  did  not  occur 

296 


LOWELL 

to  him,  probably,  that  they  have  a  point  of  view  of  their 
own.  He  did  not  set  them  off  in  his  mind  from  other 
intellectual  pursuits  and  appreciate  their  self-justifi 
cation — as  indeed  how  should  he,  expanding  in  an 
environment  that  stifled  Allston,  resthetically  modified 
only  by  an  occasional  reading  of  Ruskin,  who  never 
appreciated  this  very  keenly  himself  ?  The  great  artists 
probably  did  not  figure  in  his  selected  list  of  great 
men,  which  besides  was  further  contracted  to  include 
mainly  the  poets — the  poets  and  Abraham  Lincoln,  one 
might  say.  He  is  not  even  at  the  pains  to  keep  their 
nationality  in  mind  and — in  "On  a  Certain  ,Conde- 
scension  in  Foreigners" — makes  Holbein  and  Rubens 
fellow-countrymen  of  Rembrandt.  Ravenna  for  him  is 
merely  the  site  of  Dante's  tomb,  which,  he  says,  "is 
now  the  chief  magnet  which  draws  foreigners  and  their 
gold"  thither — Ravenna  being  actually,  of  course,  for 
art  and  measurably  for  history,  what  Carlyle  called 
Gibbon,  "that  splendid  bridge  between  the  Old  World 
and  the  New,"  and  Dante's  tomb, 

"A  little  cupola,  more  neat  than  solemn," 

being  for  the  generally  cultivated,  if  not  for  the  ex 
clusively  belletristic,  gold-bearing  foreigner,  the  least 
of  her  monuments.  He  has  misgivings  about  Michael 
Angelo— perhaps,  as  he  says,  "bitten  with  the  Anglo- 
Saxon  gadfly  that  drives  us  all  to  disenchant  artifice," 
perhaps  because  in  a  strange  land  it  behooves  one 
to  be  cautious  about  appearances.  "Michael  Angelo 
seems  to  me,"  he  writes,  "in  his  angry  reaction 

297 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

against  sentimental  beauty  to  have  mistaken  bulk  and 
brawn  for  the  antithesis  of  feebleness.  He  is  the 
apostle  of  the  exaggerated,  the  Victor  Hugo  of  paint 
ing  and  sculpture."  (Encore,  is  it  necessary  to  paren 
thesize  his  view  of  Victor  Hugo!)  "I  have  a  feeling," 
he  continues,  abandoned  altogether  by  what  Mr.  James 
calls  "the  principle  of  subtlety  in  his  intelligence/' 
"I  have  a  feeling  that  rivalry  was  a  more  powerful 
motive  with  him  than  love  of  Art,  that  he  had  the 
conscious  intention  to  be  original,  which  seldom  leads 
to  anything  better  than  being  extravagant.  The  show 
of  muscle  proves  strength  not  power."  But  he  does 
not  wish  to  be  "niggardly  toward  one  in  whom  you  can 
not  help  feeling  there  was  so  vast  a  possibility."  The 
whole  series  of  observations  illustrates  his  independ 
ence  certainly,  and  perhaps  should  modify  one's  im 
pression  of  his  lack  of  originality.  Originality,  at  any 
rate,  cannot  be  denied  to  some  architectural  remarks 
further  on  in  "A  Few  Bits  of  Roman  Mosaic."  "I 
doubt  about  domes,"  he  observes,  with  a  tentativeness 
charming  in  Lowell.  "In  Rome  they  are  so  much 
the  fashion  that  I  felt  that  they  were  the  goitre  of  archi 
tecture.  Generally  they  look  heavy.  Those  on  St. 
Mark's  in  Venice  are  the  only  light  ones  I  saw,  and 
they  look  almost  airy,  like  tents  puffed  out  with  wind. 
I  suppose  one  must  be  satisfied  with  the  interior  effect, 
which  is  certainly  noble  in  St.  Peter's.  But  for  impres- 
siveness  both  within  and  without  there  is  nothing  like 
a  Gothic  cathedral  for  me,  nothing  that  crowns  a  city 
so  'nobly,  or  makes  such  an  island  of  twilight  silence  in 

298 


LOWELL 

the  midst  of  its  noonday  clamors."  The  poet's  touch 
recalls  us  to  Lowell  again,  and  him  to  a  more  congenial 
subject.  We  are  as  relieved  as  our  guide  at  the  next 
sentence:  "Now  as  to  what. one  sees  in  the  streets,  the 
beggars  are/'  etc.,  etc.  We  are  back  on  firm  ground 
once  more,  and  our  doubts  about  Michael  Angelo  and 
about  "domes"  become  as  insubstantial  and  "airy"  as 
those  of  San  Marco  or  their  ancestral  Turcoman 
kibitkas. 

IV 

It  is  not  impertinent  to  regret  the  restrictedness  of 
culture  in  the  critic's  equipment  that  is  implied  in 
neglect  of  such  a  splendid  and  such  an  illuminating 
expression  of  the  genius  and  mind  of  man  as  the  plastic 
arts  constitute.  It  is  regrettable  in  the  case  of  Arnold, 
of  English  critics  generally.  It  is  regrettable  in  the 
case  of  Sainte-Beuve;  one  may  resent  the  peevishness 
of  the  Goncourts  or  even  sympathize  with  Champ- 
fleury's  designation  of  them  as  "ces  cocodettes  de  la  lit- 
terature"  and  all  the  more  deplore  the  ground  there 
was  for  their  impatience  with  the  eminent  literary 
critic's  artistic  deficiencies  and  his  ignorance  of  them. 
Without  their  knowledge  of  and  devotion  to  the  plastic 
arts  the  works  of  not  merely  such  critics  as  Pater  and 
Symonds,  but  even  Taine — even  Goethe  himself — would 
have  far  less  value.  More  than  any  other  critic  of  his 
eminence  Lowell  would  have  profited  by  an  acquaintance 
with  them.  An  acquaintance  with  them  would  have 
broadened  his  view — in  detail,  at  all  events — of  his 

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AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

special  and  particular  field  of  consideration,  of  belles- 
lettres;  and  it  would  perhaps  have  given  his  treatment 
of  it  the  element  that  conspicuously  it  lacks,  the  ele 
ment  of  construction  and  presentation.  Arnold,  Sainte- 
Beuve,  needed  it  far  less — as  well  as  possessing  it  far 
more.  They  were  not  exclusively  concerned  with 
belles-lettres.  And  they  were,  as  Lowell  certainly  was 
not,  saturated  with  history.  Accordingly,  when  we 
come  to  consider  Lowell  as  a  critic  we  may  almost  de 
duce  the  detail  of  his  criticism  from  his  personality 
and  his  equipment.  As  I  have  said,  he  had  a  solid  and 
independent  character,  with  a  turn  of  mind  representa 
tively  sound  and  conservative  rather  than  markedly 
individual,  and  a  temperament  disinterestedly  enthusi 
astic  without  being  sensitively  discriminating  or  specu 
lative.  And  his  equipment,  that  is  to  say,  his  culture, 
was  an  extraordinarily  bookish  one,  and,  though  in  this 
sense  thorough  and  scholarly,  exclusively  literary  and, 
for  an  exclusively  literary  culture,  singularly  independ 
ent  of  the  two  great  allies  and  supports  of  literary 
culture — history  and  aesthetics.  It  is  evident  before 
hand  that  Chatterton  will  escape  him,  that  Wordsworth 
will  bore  him,  that  Pope  will  displease  and  Byron  dis 
gust  him,  that  he  will  delight  in  Gray  and  Dryden, 
and  that  he  will  never  tire  of  singing  the  praises  of 
the  indisputably  great,  such  as  Shakespeare  and  Dante, 
Chaucer,  Spenser,  Calderon,  and  Cervantes.  It  is  evi 
dent,  too,  that  his  critical  work  will  be  at  its  best  in 
appreciation,  that  it  will  excel  more  in  finding  new 
beauties  in  the  actual  than  in  discovering  new  require- 

300 


LOWELL 

merits  in  the  ideal,  that  it  will  consider  personalities 
as  fixed  and  final,  and  not  in  their  origin,  tendencies,  or 
relations,  that  while  being  perfectly  candid  and  genuine 
it  will  be  tinctured  with  that  order  of  partisanship  which 
proceeds  from  dwelling  on  the  justice  of  its  feelings 
rather  than  on  the  truth  of  its  ideas,  that  it  will  be  de 
void  of  any  defined  philosophic  drift  or  suggestiveness, 
and  that  its  felicities  will  be  felicities  of  detail  rather 
than  of  general  view. 

His  criticism  clearly  grew  out  of  his  reading  habit, 
not  out  of  his  reflective  tendencies.  He  read  pencil  in 
hand,  and  as  he  read  he  annotated.  His  criticism  is 
therefore  largely  comment,  and,  its  original  destina 
tion  being  often  the  lecture-room,  its  tone  is  largely 
conversational.  He  collected  and  sifted  his  marginalia, 
expanded  them,  wrote  context  (multifarious  and  spir 
ited)  for  them,  supplied  them  with  introductions  (ex 
tremely  artificial  in  general),  and  presented  them  to  the 
public,  having  first,  in  many  instances,  presented  them 
to  his  pupils.  They  have  thus  an  intimate  and  familiar 
quality  and  suggest  the  lecture-room,  or  at  most  the 
lyceum,  more  vividly  than  the  forum  or  the  library. 
They  are  on  a  high  plane,  the  high  plane  on  which 
habitually  Lowell  lived  and  thought,  but  their  glance 
is  de  haul  en  bos,  and  such  traits  as  unexplained  allusions 
and  untranslated  quotations  and  recondite  references — 
a  kind  of  fatras  of  bookish  reticulation  with  which  they 
are  overspread — do  not  disguise  a  certain  complacence 
not  wholly  foreign  to  genial  condescension.  Then  there 
are  the  jokes,  the  puns,  the  witticisms  generally  of  a 

301 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

high  order  and,  though  sometimes  "naked  to  laughter" 
rather  than  provocative  of  it  in  the  reader,  very  compre 
hensibly  the  Attic  salt  of  the  class-room.  What  could 
be  wittier  or  more  incisive  than,  speaking  of  "the  aver 
age  Briton"  in  America,  "not  a  Bull  of  them  all  but  he 
is  persuaded  he  bears  Europe  on  his  back"?  On  the 
other  hand,  such  a  title  for  such  a  grave  political  es 
say  as  "The  Pickens-and-Stealin's  Administration" 
amuses  the  reader  distant  in  time  and  place  and  spirit 
less,  probably,  than  the  undergraduate  under  the 
personal  charm  of  the  author — presupposes,  in  fact,  a 
sympathetic  relation.  Similarly  the  reference  in  the 
"Thoreau"  to  the  "maggots"  of  which  New  England 
brains  were  full  in  the  40's  and  which  "must  at  times 
have  found  pitiably  short  commons."  And  a  score,  a 
hundred,  others  easily  cited.  Quite  so,  one  imagines, 
or  rather  we  know,  he  must  have  lectured  to  his  students, 
of  whom  it  is  surprising — and  discreditable  to  university 
youth — that  he  had  so  few.  It  is  less  surprising,  how 
ever,  that  his  readers  at  the  present  time  should  not 
be  more  numerous.  His  essays  are  criticism  made  easy 
— for  the  critic,  that  is  to  say,  the  learned  and  book- 
loving  critic,  and  as  correspondingly  hard  for  the  reader 
as  Sheridan  declared  all  easy  writing  to  be.  The 
reader  is  at  a  disadvantage.  He  can  only  envy  the  ex 
perience  Mr.  James  records  in  describing  how  he  "on 
dusky  winter  afternoons  escaped  with  irresponsible  zeal 
into  the  glow  of  Mr.  Lowell's  learned  lamp-light,  the 
particular  incidents  of  which  in  the  small,  still  lecture- 
room,  and  the  illumination  of  his  head  and  hands,  I  re- 

302 


LOWELL 

call,"  he  says,  "  with  extreme  vividness. "  The  illumina 
tion  of  the  printed  page  is  our  sole  resource.  And  with 
this,  as  I  have  intimated,  I  do  not  think  quite  sufficient 
pains  have  been  taken  to  fit  it  for  going  out  into  the 
world  alone,  as  it  were,  and  taking  its  place  in  the  com 
pany  it  really  belongs  in. 

To  begin  with,  the  critical  essays  are  distinctly  art 
less  in  both  the  literal  and  the  derived  sense  of  the 
word.  And  in  the  essay,  as  elsewhere,  art  is  indis 
pensable  to  real  effectiveness  and  permanent  interest. 
It  is  surely  not  the  one  form  of  literary  expression  that 
is  exempt  from  this  necessity.  A  critical  essay  is  not 
a  cairn  of  comment,  but  an  organic  composition.  An 
organism  is  a  whole  of  which  the  parts  are  mutually 
dependent  and  each  essential  to  the  whole.  An  ar 
tistic  organism  is  one  whose  structure  is  expressive 
rather  than  expressed — its  means  answerable  to  analy 
sis,  its  effect  sensible  in  aspect.  An  essay  of  Lowell's 
has  this  quality  no  more  than  one  of  Emerson's  has. 
It  is  not  a  quality  that  either  of  them  sought.  It  is 
a  quality,  indeed,  probably  without  special  appeal  to 
either  the  professor  or  the  prophet,  and  Lowell  was  a 
little  of  a  prophet  just  as  Emerson  has  something  of 
the  professor.  Neither  is  actuated  by  the  motive  of  the 
artist,  the  desire  to  please.  This  desire  is  as  much  that 
of  the  artist  in  criticism  as  it  is  that  of  the  designer 
of  a  cathedral.  It  is  because  rhetoric  is  an  art  that 
Aristotle  defined  its  end  as  not  conviction  but  persua 
sion.  Lowell  never  tried  to  persuade  any  one  in  his  life, 
his  strong  strain  of  didacticism  showing  itself  rather  in 

303 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

confirming  the  accepted  than  in  commending  the  over 
looked.  The  "Biglow  Papers"  themselves  do  not 
proselytize,  but  merely  pronounce.  And  it  probably 
comes  about  quite  naturally,  quite  normally,  therefore — 
apart  from  its  desultory  class-room  origin  in  many 
instances — that  whatever  else  a  critical  essay  by  him 
may  be,  however  penetrating,  instructive,  valuable  for 
admonition,  reproof,  or  enlightenment,  it  is  certainly 
not  in  any  satisfactory  sense  an  artistic  performance. 
Consequently  his  criticism  has  less  currency,  I  think, 
than  its  substance  deserves.  You  have  an  active,  even 
a  vivid  sense  that  he  knows  what  he  is  talking  about,  but 
you  are  less — considerably  less— stirred  by  what  he  says. 
One  receives  impressions  from  it,  which  he  remembers 
or  not,  as  it  may  happen,  but  they  are  not  central  or 
complete  impressions.  They  are  not  informed  by  an 
idea  of  the  subject,  but  are  rather  of  points  of  detail, 
often  so  casual  as  to  have  almost  an  obiter  effect. 

It  is  easy  to  seem  pedantic  in  insisting  on  organic 
quality  as  an  essential  of  effective  and  agreeable  com 
position  of  any  kind,  and  so  on.  To  do  so  is  merely 
to  rehearse  a  commonplace  of  elementary  rhetoric.  Of 
course,  a  literal  exemplification  of  the  principle  would, 
if  on  a  scale  of  any  size — larger  than  that  of  a  sonnet  or 
triolet,  say — incur  imminent  risk  of  becoming  an  ex 
tremely  wooden  affair.  A  writer  who  should  undertake 
to  make  a  composition  impeccably  organic  must  either 
attempt  a  very  insignificant  composition  or  achieve  a 
mosaic  rather  than  the  living  result  that  precisely,  in 
art  as  in  nature,  an  organism  is  and  a  mosaic  is  not. 

304 


LOWELL 

But  to  paraphrase  the  ethical  ideal  of  the  first  great 
literary  critic,  there  is  reason  in  all  things.  As  a  matter 
of  fact  there  is  only  one  way,  probably,  of  attaining  this 
result  of  unity  in  any  various  work  of  art,  and  that  is 
to  keep  the  ensemble  in  mind.  Now  to  do  this  one 
must  first  have  in  mind  an  ensemble.  The  literary  or 
other  artist  is  no  freer  from  this  necessity  than  the  sculp 
tor,  to  whom  it  is  almost  a  physical  impossibility  suc 
cessfully  to  model  a  detail  of  anything  in  the  round 
without  constant  "reference  to  the  profile."  Some 
central  conception  is  similarly  necessary  for  the  suc 
cessful  conduct  of  any  composition.  If  it  is  an  essay  on 
Rousseau  or  Keats  or  Dante — a  full-length  portrait, 
a  half-length,  or  a  head — any  feature  or  phase  of  his  pro 
ductions,  his  place  in  literature,  his  influence  on  man 
kind,  or  whatever,  or  all  these  together — a  necessary  pre 
liminary  will  be  the  establishment  of  some  general  idea 
of  the  subject.  The  essay  will  be  the  expression  in 
detail  of  this  conception — in  proportion  to  its  com 
plexity  the  elaborate  expression  of  it.  Reading  and 
general  undirected  reflection  serve  merely  as  agencies 
formative  of  the  conception  itself.  This  is  the  undoubted 
process  of  all  the  great  critics,  however  various  their 
tendencies,  points  of  view,  and  technical  expression. 
Whatever  may  be  said  for  the  superiority  of  the  much- 
vaunted  historical  method  over  the  intuitive  must  be 
based  on  the  superiority  of  induction  in  forming  this 
central  conception,  and  cannot  apply  to  the  evolution 
of  the  detail,  which  must  inexorably  be  deduced  or  the 
practical  result  is  heterogeneity.  Arnold's  reply  to 

305 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

Scherer's  contention  that  "out  of  the  writer's  character 
and  the  study  of  his  age  there  spontaneously  issues  the 
right  understanding  of  his  work,"  namely,  "in  a  mind 
qualified  in  a  certain  way  it  will — not  in  all  minds,"  is 
unimpeachable.  To  be  qualified  to  express  energeti 
cally  and  effectively  any  understanding  at  all  of  a  writ 
er's  work,  however,  whether  correct  or  not,  involves  the 
preliminary  synthesis  of  a  general  conception.  That 
at  least  is  an  artistic  necessity  involved,  as  a  matter  of 
fact,  in  the  laws  of  thought,  if  one  cared  to  go  into  that. 
To  say  that  Lowell's  criticism  lacks  this  initial  cen 
tral  conception  would  be  to  say  that  it  is  written  at 
random.  But,  indeed,  it  often  has  precisely  the  ap 
pearance  of  being  written  at  random,  and  precisely  be 
cause  his  central  conception  is  vague.  Erasmus's 
witty  and  apt  complaint  that  "  every  definition  is  a  mis 
fortune"  related  to  the  abstractions  of  doctrine  and 
dogma.  In  art  the  concrete  reigns  supreme  and  noth 
ing  can  be  too  definite — even  if,  or  perhaps  especially  if, 
it  is  to  express  the  abstract.  The  essay  on  Dante  Low 
ell  says  is  the  result  of  twenty  years  of  study.  One  may 
easily  believe  it — taking  the  statement  somewhat 
loosely,  as  of  course  he  intended  it.  It  is  packed  with 
interesting  and  illuminating  detail,  and  has  been  called 
his  ablest  performance  in  criticism.  In  Dante's  case, 
more  than  in  most  others,  to  admire  is  to  comprehend. 
Lowell's  admiration  is  limitless  and  one  feels  that  he 
understood  his  subject.  But  his  expression  of  it  is  only 
less  inartistic  than  it  is  uncritical.  His  twenty  years  of 
study  have  resulted  in  his  comprehension  of  his  theme, 

306 


LOWELL 

but  not  in  reducing  it  to  any  definite  proportions  or 
giving  it  any  sharpness  of  outline.  There  is  nothing 
about  it  he  does  not  know  and  perhaps  one  may  say 
nothing  in  it  that  he  does  not  appreciate.  But  he  does 
not  communicate  because  he  does  not  express  his  general 
conception  of  Dante  and  he  does  not  because  he  has 
not  himself,  one  feels  sure,  thought  it  out  into  definition. 
He  is  interested  in  ranking  his  poet,  not  describing  him. 
Dante  is  next  to  Shakespeare,  next  to  Homer,  above  all 
others,  and  so  on.  Think  of  him  in  connection  with 
Byron!  "Our  nineteenth  century,"  he  says,  "made  an 
idol  of  the  noble  lord  who  broke  his  heart  in  verse  once 
every  six  months,  but  the  fourteenth  was  lucky  enough 
to  produce  and  not  make  an  idol  of  that  rarest  earthly 
phenomenon,  a  man  of  genius  who  could  hold  heart 
break  at  bay  for  twenty  years,  and  " — but  no  one  can  care 
for  the  conclusion  of  such  a  sentence  as  that.  Lowell 
himself  has  been  less  fortunate  than  he  says  the  four 
teenth  century  was,  but  his  idolatry  merely  consecrates 
the  looseness  that  mars  his  admirably  sympathetic  essay. 
For  just  as  the  artlessness,  the  formlessness,  which 
his  essays  betray — and  which  Mr.  Greenslet  illustrates 
by  an  amusing  analysis  of  the  "Lessing"—  is  a  conse 
quence  of  his  lack  of  a  central  and  unified  conception 
of  his  subject,  so  this  lack  is  itself  a  consequence  of  the 
absence  in  his  brilliant  equipment  of  the  critical  spirit, 
the  critical  temperament.  The  possession  of  this  spirit 
would  have  perturbed  him  out  of  his  Capuan  dalliance 
with  detail  and  spurred  him  to  the  capture  of  the  capital, 
on  which  for  life,  as  well  as  order,  all  the  provinces  of 

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AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

detail  depend.  The  critical  temperament  is  a  reflective 
one.  Criticism  is  not  the  product  of  reading,  but  of 
thought.  To  produce  vital  and  useful  criticism  it  is 
necessary  to  think,  think,  think,  and  then,  when  tired 
of  thinking,  to  think  more.  Lowell's  temperament  is 
not  unfairly  to  be  inferred  from  a  playful  but  indicative 
passage  in  "A  Moosehead  Journal."  "It  is  curious," 
he  says,  "how  tyrannical  the  habit  of  reading  is  and  what 
shifts  are  made  to  escape  thinking.  There  is  no  bore  we 
dread  being  left  alone  with  so  much  as  our  own  minds." 
Hence  the  predominance  in  his  essays  of  desultory  over 
consecutive  thought,  as  well  as  of  detail  over  ensemble 
in  their  form.  Hence,  too,  his  hospitable  harboring 
of  the  partisan  spirit.  And  as  his  representative  turn 
of  mind  dominated  his  individuality,  the  partisan  spirit 
blurred — or,  if  one  chooses,  gilded — his  perceptions, 
and  dulled,  or  at  least  deflected,  his  penetration.  From 
the  great  endeavor  of  contemporary  criticism,  if  it  be 
"to  see  the  object  as  in  itself  it  really  is,"  he  is  con 
stitutionally  disassociated. 

Accordingly,  it  discloses  a  fine  trait  in  his  character 
that  his  essays  should  be,  in  general,  so  compact  of 
eulogy.  Choosing,  as  I  have  said,  the  best  of  subjects, 
by  the  natural  selection  of  an  aristocratic  intellect,  he 
was  here,  to  be  sure,  in  the  main  on  safe  ground.  It 
would  certainly  be  a  task  almost — not  quite — as  idle  as 
ungracious  to  attempt  to  pick  flaws  in  or  seriously 
to  controvert  the  larger  proportion  of  his  eulogiums. 
They  constitute  a  veritable  literary  monument,  with  the 
traditional  epitaph  inspiration,  and  might  be  entitled 

308 


LOWELL 

"The  Praise  of  Great  Writers,"  being  sometimes,  too, 
almost  lyrical  enough  in  spirit  to  be  called  poems  in 
prose.  Of  his  dispraise  one  easily  feels  less  certain. 
In  the  nature  of  things  ^-there  being  notoriously  no 
standard  of  the  false,  the  ugly,  and  the  wrong — censure 
exacts  more  qualifications  in  the  critic  than  eulogy. 
But  the  critical  spirit  may  be  as  clearly  absent  from 
sound  praise  as  from  unjust  censure,  and  it  is  only  the 
critical  spirit  that  can  preserve  criticism  from  that 
oblivion  which  swallows  all  at  last  but  which  is  indeco 
rously  hungry  for  the  partial  and  the  partisan.  Mr. 
Greenslet  says  Lowell's  essays  are  read  in  colleges.  As 
if  that  were  any  augury  of  immortality! 

There  is  no  qualification  to  his  praise  to  give  it  per 
suasiveness,  to  say  nothing  of  permanence.  The 
Dante  essay  (to  recur  to  this  representative  example)  is 
all  patently  partisan — patently  therefore,  in  the  sixth 
century  of  Dante  criticism,  either  unsound  or  super 
fluous;  the  day  of  discrimination  is  never  over,  but 
wholesale  consideration  reaches  finally  its  term.  Low 
ell  is,  like  all  the  temperamentally  energetic  but  reflect 
ively  indolent,  particularly  fond  of  superlatives.  Sir 
Thomas  Browne's  is  the  greatest  imagination  in  English 
literature  since  Shakespeare.  Hawthorne  is  "  the  rarest 
creative  imagination  of  the  century,  the  rarest  in  some 
ideal  respects  since  Shakespeare."  Milton  is  "the  most 
impressive  figure  in  our  literary  history."  Donne 
"wrote  more  profound  verses  than  any  other  English 
poet  save  one  only."  Dante  is  "the  most  masculine  of 
poets " ;  French  "  the  most  feminine  of  tongues."  Mar- 

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AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

veil's  "Horatian  Ode"  is  "the  most  truly  classic  in  our 
language."  "  Nothing  in  all  poetry  approaches  the 
imaginative  grandeur"  of  Dante's  vision  at  the  end  of 
the  " Paradise."  Chaucer  is  "the  greatest  of  English 
poets  save  one."  The  secret  password  of  all  poetry 
"with  the  most  haunting  memory"  is  a  distich  he  cites 
from  a  Spanish  ballad — needing  its  context,  too,  to  be 
"haunting"  at  all.  English  is  "a  better  literary  medi 
um  than  any  modern  tongue."  He  has  the  tone  of  an 
official  conferring  decorations  or  degrees. 

Superlatives  may  be  just,  but  they  do  not  define. 
Obviously  they  state  the  known  in  terms  of  the  un 
known — a  in  terms  of  x,  as  Lowell  might  say;  clearly 
the  converse  of  the  critical  order.  The  general  atmos 
phere  of  idolatry  that  they  create  is  unfortunate  because 
it  is  plainly  "too  good  to  be  true,"  and  in  a  world  of 
imperfections  the  result  is  bound  to  lack  verisimilitude. 
Dante  in  Lowell's  pages  ceases  to  be  credible;  or  if  ab 
stractly  credible  is  concretely  very  difficult  to  conceive  as 
a  mediaeval  Florentine,  as  well  as  a  very  different  per 
sonage  from  the  Dante  of  other  commentators.  Miss 
Rossetti,  for  example,  whose  interpretation  Lowell 
praises  so  highly  as  to  say  that  he  shall  only  endeavor 
to  supplement  it  by  the  "side-lights"  of  his  own  pro 
longed  study— Miss  Rossetti  acknowledges  that  after 
Beatrice's  death  Dante  gave  himself  up  "more  or  less  to 
sensual  gratification  and  earthly  aim."  On  this  Lowell 
remarks:  "The  earthly  aim  we  in  a  certain  sense  ad 
mit;  the  sensual  gratification  we  reject  as  utterly  in 
consistent,  not  only  with  Dante's  principles,  but  with  his 

310 


LOWELL 

character  and  indefatigable  industry."  What  it  is  not 
inconsistent  with  is  the  known,  or  at  all  events, 
universally  credited,  facts  of  his  life.  "Let  us  dismiss 
at  once  and  forever  all  the  idle  tales  of  Dante's  amours/' 
exclaims  Lowell,  with  extraordinary  finality.  But  the 
reader  is  bound  to  reflect  that  all  the  "tales"  are  not 
"idle."  Some  of  them  deserve  philosophic  treatment — 
for  instance,  one  may  say,  those  on  which,  in  the  pas 
sage  of  the  "Purgatorio"  where  she  reproves  him  for 
his  backslidings,  Beatrice  probably  based  her  rebuke. 
Such  treatment  is  this  sentence  by  Arnold,  who  cer 
tainly  had  not  devoted  twenty  years  of  study  to  Dante, 
which  is  unparalleled  for  penetration  by  anything  in 
Lowell's  essay — or,  in  fact,  in  Lowell  anywhere:  "We 
know,"  he  says,  "  how  the  followers  of  the  spiritual  life 
tend  to  be  antinomian  in  what  belongs  to  the  outward 
life;  they  do  not  attach  much  importance  to  such  ir 
regularity  themselves;  it  is  their  fault  as  complete  men 
that  they  do  not;  it  is  the  fault  of  the  spiritual  life  as 
a  complete  life  that  it  allows  this  tendency;  by  dint  of 
despising  the  outward  life  it  loses  control  of  this  life, 
and  of  itself  when  in  contact  with  it."  Boccaccio,  who 
is  one  of  the  arch-offenders  Lowell  would  "dismiss  at 
once  and  forever,"  would  have  smiled  assent  to  this. 
But  I  have  cited  it,  as  one  is  constantly  tempted  to  cite 
Arnold  in  contrast  to  Lowell  as  a  critic,  because  it 
shows  how  the  definition  which  is  lost  by  looseness  is  se 
cured  by  discrimination. 

Another  remark  of  Arnold's  which  illustrates  the 
same  thing  is:    "Perhaps  in  Sophocles  the  thinking 

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AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

power  a  little  overbalances  the  religious  sense,  just  as 
in  Dante  the  religious  sense  overbalances  the  thinking 
power."  That  is  a  critical  and  illuminating  statement. 
Having,  inevitably,  to  compare  Dante  with  the  Greek 
drama,  Lowell  puts  the  matter  in  his  conventional 
and  figurative  way,  maintaining  that  the  Greek  drama 
satisfies  "our  highest  conception  of  form,"  but  "its 
circle  of  motives  was  essentially  limited,"  it  "is  pri 
marily  Greek  and  secondarily  human,"  whereas  "the 
Christian  idea  has  to  do  with  the  human  soul,  which 
Christianity  may  almost  be  said  to  have  invented,"  and 
the  "Divine  Comedy"  is  "no  pagan  temple  enshrining  a 
type  of  the  human  made  divine  by  triumph  of  corporeal 
beauty,"  but  a  cathedral  whose  "  leading  thought  is  that 
of  aspiration,"  or,  in  fact,  a  Christian  basilica:  "there 
is  first,"  he  concludes,  "the  ethnic  forecourt,  then  the 
purgatorial  middle  space,  and  last  the  holy  of  holies, 
dedicated  to  the  eternal  presence  of  the  mediatorial 
God."  No  doubt  there  is  justice  in  the  general  con 
tention.  No  doubt,  in  a  sense,  Christianity  invented — 
or  one  would  prefer  to  say  discovered — the  human  soul. 
But  it  is  just  this  sense  that  the  critic  would  seek  to  de 
termine — precisely  what,  in  fact,  Arnold's  sentence 
hints  at.  Lowell's  dithyramb  is  partisanship.  He  is 
always  a  partisan  in  allusions  to  the  Greeks.  He 
yields  them  supremacy  in  form  with  the  readiness  of 
a  formless  writer  to  whom  form  is  "even  now  sour" 
or  else  unessential.  But  he  has  absolutely  no  sym 
pathy  with  Greek  substance.  The  best  pages  of  his 
essay  on  Shakespeare  discuss  the  difference  between 

312 


LOWELL 

Shakespeare  and  the  Greek  drama  in  that  Shakespeare's 
characters  incur,  and  those  of  the  Greek  dramatists 
suffer,  their  fate.  But  he  treats  the  subject  with  didac 
tic  finality,  as  if  the  insoluble  question  of  determination 
were  absolutely  settled,  and  not  at  all  as  a  critic,  so  that 
what  he  has  to  say  is  really  of  only  exegetical  value.  The 
critic  would  say — as  Arnold  does  in  effect — merely  that 
in  the  Greek  drama  the  element  of  conscience  is  less  de 
veloped  than  in  the  Christian.  The  conscience  of  Soc 
rates  enabled  him  to  be  "  terribly  at  ease  in  Zion  ";  that 
of  Dante  permitted  him  a  similar  tranquillity,  perhaps, 
only  in  putting  his  enemies  in  hell.  The  subject  is  too 
large  for  passing  treatment.  My  only  point  is  that 
Lowell  treats  it  in  frankly  partisan  fashion  and  that 
the  partisan  rather  than  the  critical  inspiration  marks 
his  philosophic  treatment  in  general. 

This  being  the  case,  it  would  no  doubt  be  fortunate 
that  in  general  there  is  so  little  philosophy  in  his  essays, 
if  it  were  not  for  the  fact  that  the  philosophic  spirit  is 
the  life,  as  the  critical  instinct  is  the  inspiration,  of  criti 
cism.  The  two,  indeed,  are  hardly  to  be  discriminated; 
and  as  the  absence  of  the  latter  in  Lowell  is  attested  by 
the  lack  of  centrality  of  conception  responsible  for  his 
formlessness,  so  it,  in  turn,  implies  the  absence  of  that 
interest  in  ideas  as  such,  in  and  of  themselves,  which 
marks  that  side  of  the  critical  temperament,  approxi 
mately  at  least,  to  be  called  philosophic.  For  this  there 
is  absolutely  no  adequate  substitute  in  criticism.  With 
it  the  critic  may  lack  almost  everything  else.  Stendhal, 
for  example,  one  of  the  great  figures  in  criticism,  de- 

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AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

pends  upon  it  almost  wholly.  He  had,  it  is  true,  one  or 
two  saving  lines  of  thought  which  he  held  to  with  a  pas 
sionate  fixity  unknown  in  Cambridge  and  which  gave 
all  his  work  a  consistent  tendency.  But  nothing  can 
be  more  formless  than  the  " Promenades  dans  Rome" 
or  the  "Histoire  de  la  peinture  en  Italic,"  and  they  will 
never  accordingly  enjoy  currency.  They  are  also  full  of 
extravagances — extravagance  being  precisely  one  of 
Beyle's  lignes  directrices.  What  stamps  him  as  a 
stimulating  and  perennially  interesting  critic  is  his  de 
votion  to  ideas.  Exiled  in  Civita  Vecchia  he  longed 
for  Paris,  by  no  means  for  patriotic  reasons,  but  be 
cause  he  could  get  the  four  or  five  cubic  feet  of  ideas 
which  he  said  he  needed  for  daily  consumption  as  much 
as  a  steamboat  needs  coal.  Of  ideas  in  this  sense  Low 
ell's  consumption  was  comparatively  small,  altogether 
disproportionate  to  the  volumes  of  often  picturesquely 
wreathed  smoke  into  which  the  alembic  of  his  extraor 
dinary  faculty  for  expression  converted  such  as  he 
consumed.  So  far  as  luxuriance  may  be  predicated  of 
them,  his  ideas  were  in  general  the  conceits,  notions, 
fancies,  of  the  true  poet,  of  the  observant  rather  than 
the  reflective  order.  Of  philosophic  ideas,  general 
ideas,  there  is  in  his  many  volumes  a  dearth  that  only 
ceases  to  be  surprising  when  one  recalls  Mr.  James's 
remark  that  he  "had  no  speculative  side"  or  his  own 
reference,  indeed,  to  "speculation's  windy  waste." 
Macaulay,  in  comparison,  is  alive  with  them. 

They  certainly  can  be  overworked.     M.  Faguet  has 
a  charming  passage  about  them  in  this  sense.     "It  is 

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LOWELL 

impossible,"  he  says,  "  to  be  quite  ignorant  of  any 
thing  without  systematizing  it  a  great  deal  or  to  know 
anything  without  systematizing  it  a  little;  so  that  one 
cannot  escape  general  ideas  even  by  virtue  and  effort,  and 
learning  itself  only  serves  to  enable  us  to  avoid  them  in 
excess."  A  certain  order  of  truisms  aside,  Lowell's 
general  intellectual  superiority,  his  admirable  culture, 
saved  him  from  the  mediocrity  thus  satirized,  of  dealing 
with  general  ideas  by  main  strength  and  a  tout  propos. 
Also  his  unspeculative  temperament.  And  as  I  say,  they 
are  infrequent  in  his  pages.  An  occasional  distinction, 
that  between  the  poetic  temperament  and  the  poetic 
faculty,  in  his  "Percival,"  for  instance,  is  vouchsafed 
us;  but,  on  the  other  hand,  when  he  deals  with  ideas 
of  a  general  nature  he  is  apt  to  recall  Mr.  Howells's  re 
mark  about  an  eminent  publicist  accustomed  "to  do 
his  boldest  thinking  along  the  safest  lines."  His 
normal  attitude  is  very  well  indicated  in  his  signalizing 
as  "an  important  and  even  profound  truth"  Webster's 
assertion  that  a  coward  cannot  be  an  honest  man,  and 
calling  it  an  example  of  the  "metaphysical  apothegms" 
of  which  he  says  only  Chapman  was  fonder  than  Web 
ster.  Ideas  are  certainly,  if  succintly  expressed,  "meta 
physical  apothegms,"  but  to  think  of  them  as  such  is  to 
take  rather  an  unfriendly  view  of  them. 

Consequently,  in  his  criticism  one  feels  the  lack  of  the 
element  that  gives  it  at  its  best  what  it  has  been  said 
even  a  biography  should  have,  namely,  "a  life  of  its 
own  apart  from  the  subject."  Of  his  own  general  con 
ception  of  life  and  art,  we  get  very  little.  He  had 

315 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

apparently  no  particular  philosophic  view  to  advocate 
or  express  and  his  essays  have  no  general  philosophic 
derivation.  His  critical  work  as  a  whole  lacks  the 
unity  of  a  body  of  doctrine  or  even  a  personal  point  of 
view.  It  does  not  discuss  principles.  Its  chief  value 
is  exegetical.  This  is  why  he  is  at  his  best  in  his  "  Dante" 
his  "  Chaucer,"  his  "Dryden,"  his  "  Shakespeare," 
and  the  Elizabethans  generally.  For  as  exegesis  is 
the  strongest  part  of  his  criticism,  linguistics  are  the 
strongest  part  of  his  exegesis  and  he  is  even  better  in 
discussing  the  language  than  in  explaining  the  substance 
of  the  poets.  For  language  he  had  the  instinct  to  be 
expected  of  such  a  master  of  expression,  and  of  archaic, 
recondite,  or  foreign  language  he  was  an  admirable 
interpreter — being  both  a  poet  and  a  precisian.  In 
this  field  it  would  be  difficult  to  overpraise  him. 


His  style  lacks  continuity — which  is  to  say  that  it 
lacks  style.  That  is  the  first,  and  I  think  the  final, 
impression  left  by  any  prolonged  consecutive  reading  of 
his  prose.  One  feels  the  lack  of  continuity  of  presenta 
tion  consequent  upon  the  lack  of  sustained  thought,  the 
sense  of  which,  also,  is  thus  considerably  accentuated. 
The  appearance  of  vagrom  annotation  which  the  es 
says  often  have  is  enhanced  by  the  absence  of  distri 
bution  and  organization  in  the  design,  or  rather,  by 
the  absence  of  design  itself.  I  think  it  is  also  enhanced 
by  the  brilliancy  of  the  detail.  Lowell  had  an  extraor- 

316 


LOWELL 

dinary,  a  wonderful  gift  of  expression— a  faculty  per 
haps  as  often  fatal  as  favorable  to  the  achievement  of 
style.  He  could,  as  the  phrase  is,  say  anything  he  liked. 
He  could  follow  the  turns  and  shadings  of  his  lively  fancy 
into  all  sorts  of  recesses  of  refinement,  and  with  the 
greatest  ease.  This  sense  of  ease  is  the  greatest  charm 
of  his  style.  The  reader  savors  it — when  he  can  ab 
stract  it  from  its  associated  phenomena — with  the  satis 
faction  always  aroused  by  the  untrammelled  function 
ing  of  any  truly  native  and  effective  faculty.  And 
often  it  evokes  the  additional  enjoyment  of  a  fine 
faculty  at  play,  revelling  in  its  own  effortless  activities. 
Often,  too,  it  must  be  said,  it  falls  into  the  clutches  of 
excess,  of  which  it  is,  of  course,  the  natural  prey,  un 
wary  as  the  bird  blind  to  the  fascination  of  the  serpent; 
often  the  sense  of  effortless  ease  shades  into  that  of  a 
kind  of  decorous  riot,  which  would  be  distressing  if  it 
were  not  tinctured  by  a  genial  self-satisfaction  that 
renders  it  insipid  instead.  But  at  its  best,  Lowell's 
gift  of  expression  vivifies  his  prose  immensely.  It  makes 
an  occasional  stretch,  now  and  then  substantially  long 
reaches,  of  his  essays — especially  those  in  familiar 
vein,  like  the  "Moosehead  Journal"  and  the  " Conde 
scension  in  Foreigners"— a  succession  of  what  are 
known  as  "good  things."  He  was  himself  extremely 
partial  to  both  the  phrase  and  the  fact  of  "good  things." 
Reflection  with  him  no  doubt  frequently  took  the  form 
of  preparing  them,  and  one  can  predicate  in  fancy 
the  petillant  way  in  which  preliminarily  his  mind  ticked 
them  off — whether  in  a  coupe  going  to  a  public  dinner 

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AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

or  in  his  library  at  Elmwood,  a  wide-margined  "  Cer 
vantes  "  on  his  lap  and  nicotian  spirals  from  his  con 
templative  pipe  doubtless  half  veiling 

"  — a  statue  by  Powers  or  a  picture  by  Page" 

that  must  have  been  among  its  Lares.  These  "good 
things"  are  also  really  good — and  not  the  counterfeits 
that  so  frequently  impose  on  a  lazy  and  loose  apprecia 
tive  sense.  They  will  all  parse  according  to  the  strictest 
syntax  of  the  grammar  of  excellence.  They  have  no 
meretricious  ring.  They  are  not  said  for  effect,  but 
from  inspiration.  They  are  free  from  the  taint  of 
"  rhetoric " — that  compound  of  charlatanry  and  con 
vention.  At  least  their  only  defect  is  the  occasional 
error  in  taste,  and  this  is  due  to  either  excess  or  energy. 
Measure  and  reserve  are  not  essential  traits  of  the 
"good  thing,"  which  may  sin  against  both  and  still 
merely  fail,  negatively,  to  be  an  even  better  thing. 

And  Lowell 's  good  things  are  curiously  sui  generis. 
They  are  not  rarely  the  good  things  of  the  poet  who  is 
touched  as  well  as  enlightened  by  the  truths  he  dis 
covers  or  rather  feels  with  personal  stress  and  states, 
accordingly,  in  figurative  fashion ;  for  example,  "  Style, 
the  handmaid  of  talent,  the  helpmeet  of  genius." 
They  are  as  a  rule,  however,  curiously  devoid  of  epigram 
matic  quality,  as  that  quality  is  displayed  in  the  most 
eminent  examples  of  epigram;  a  fact  which  proceeds, 
I  suppose,  from  his  constitutional  neglect  of  the  field  of 
"general  ideas."  Often  extremely  witty,  their  wit  is  not 
pure  wit,  any  more  than  it  is  pure  humor,  but  a  kind  of 

318 


LOWELL 

combination  of  the  two— wit,  let  us  say,  with  the  inspira 
tion  of  humor.  It  is,  like  his  mind,  sensible  and  sound 
and  unspeculative.  It  neither  flashes  nor  glows,  but 
sparkles.  It  does  not  illumine  a  subject  with  a  chance 
light,  a  sudden  turn,  a  wilful  refraction,  a  half  truth, 
but  plays  about  it  sportively — leaving  it,  besides,  pretty 
much  as  it  found  it.  No  one  would  call  his  wit  search 
ing.  Lowell  possessed  too  little  deference  as  well 
as  too  little  malice  to  be  distinctly  penetrating.  It  has 
a  very  persistent  judicious  side,  infallibly  provocative 
in  the  end  of  grief  in  the  judicious.  For  nothing  will 
save  a  succession  of  good  things  considered  as  the  web  of 
a  sustained  literary  production  but  the  spice  of  paradox. 
Paradox  is  the  only  variant  of  the  inevitable  monotony. 
It  is  the  life  of  Stendhal's  essays,  one  may  almost  say, 
to  cite  again  an  example  of  formlessness  paralleling 
Lowell's.  But  it  never  occurs  in  Lowell.  He  can,  on  oc 
casion,  be  trivial,  even  flippant,  wilful,  even  wrong- 
headed,  but  never  paradoxical.  One  gets  tired  finally 
of  the  undisputed  thing  said  in  such  a  witty  way. 
Nay,  one  must  also  admit  fatigue  with  what  he  himself 
would  call  the  perfect  concinnity  of  all  this  brilliant  and 
desultory  detail  and  itches  to  cast  his  oyster-shell 
against  this  impeccable  Aristides  of  expression. 

But  from  the  point  of  view  of  style  its  defect  is 
that  it  is  detail,  and  so  accentuated  as  to  nullify  the  en 
semble,  on  which  style  inexorably  depends.  For,  how 
ever  one  define  it,  style  implies  a  sustained  flight.  Lowell 
achieves  it  in  his  poetry  sometimes  splendidly,  superbly; 
which  renders  it  at  first  thought  unaccountable  that  his 

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AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

prose  should  be  so  desert  of  it.  Other  poets  have  never 
so  conspicuously  fallen  down  in  this  respect  on  alighting 
from  their  Pegasus.  But  no  doubt  the  reason  is  that 
whereas  he  was  not  habituated  to  sustained  thought, 
and  shrank  recalcitrant  from  its  concatenation,  he 
delighted  in  sustained  emotion — the  simpler  the  better, 
too.  "  Style,"  says  Buff  on — and  one  cannot  too  often 
cite  the  remark  in  explanation  of  his  much  misunder 
stood  "le  style,  c'est  I'homme" — " style  is  nothing  other 
than  the  order  and  movement  which  we  put  into  our 
thoughts."  In  Lowell's  prose  either  there  is  no  order 
and  movement  or  it  exists  only  in  passages.  And  these 
passages  not  only  count  as  detail— like  the  good  things — 
but  they  are  less  noteworthy  because  they  are  less,  far 
less,  individual.  There  are  places,  says  Mr.  James,  in 
which  "  he  sounds  like  a  younger  brother  of  Bacon  and 
of  Milton."  Precisely.  But  one  could  wish  for  more 
such  sentences  as  Mr.  James  quotes  in  support  of  his 
remark:  "Oblivion  looks  in  the  face  of  the  Grecian 
Muse  only  to  forget  her  errand."  They  are  far  from 
unwelcome  punctuation  of  the  prose  in  which,  in  Mr. 
James's  words  again,  "he  sounds  like  no  one  but  his 
inveterately  felicitous  self," — even  such  of  it  as  this 
sentence,  also  illustratively  adduced  by  Mr.  James,  from 
the  address  on  Wordsworth :  "Too  of  ten  .  .  .  he  seems 
diligently  intent  on  producing  fire  by  the  primitive 
method  of  rubbing  the  dry  sticks  of  his  blank  verse  one 
against  the  other,  while  we  stand  in  shivering  expecta 
tion  of  the  flame  that  never  comes."  There  are  times, 
one  feels,  when  Lowell's  inspiration  is  that  of  Pe*richole's 

320 


LOWELL 

"Oui,  bonnes  gens,  sautez  dessus,"  and  when,  I  think, 
his  style  is  subtly  injured  by  his  rather  primitive  trucu 
lent  inclinations  at  the  expense  of  the  obviously  "par 
trop  bele."  But  his  opera  bouffe  is  as  Mr.  James  says, 
"  inveterately  felicitous,"  and  perhaps  it  is  pedantry  to 
object  to  Offenbachian  treatment  of  Wordsworth  and  at 
the  same  time  quarrel  with  the  obviousness  of  its  rel 
evancy. 

"Inveterately  felicitous,"  in  fact,  is  not  an  inexact 
epithet  for  Lowell's  figures  in  general.  And  of  both 
the  good  things  and  the  elevated  passages  of  his  prose 
the  figure  is  an  unfailing  characteristic.  His  poetic 
faculty  follows  him  even  into  argumentation  and  gilds 
his  rhetoric  with  fancy.  His  figures  are  of  course  vari 
ably,  however  inveterately,  felicitous,  but  they  are  al 
ways  favorites  with  him,  one  feels,  over  the  substance  it 
is  their  formal  function  to  illuminate  or  adorn.  The 
logical  path  through  one  of  his  essays,  or  such  semblance 
of  one  as  he  follows,  is  fringed  with  figures  that  count 
really  as  digressions,  so  much  do  they  absorb  his  zest  and 
so  thoroughly  does  he  explore  and  exploit  them.  The 
reader  more  easily  surfeited  with  straying  might  find 
these  loops  and  excursions  too  frequent,  but  for  the  fact 
that  they  are  not  rarely  quite  as  entertaining  as  the 
highroad  of  his  thought]  from  which,  besides,  they 
diverge  without  abruptness  and  to  which  they  always 
return,  for  though  they  vary  in  felicity,  his  figures  are 
simply  never  inapt.  A  page  opened  at  random,  for 
example,  says  of  the  Elizabethans :  "  But  though  fortu 
nate  in  being  able  to  gather  their  language  with  the 

321 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

dew  still  on  it,  as  herbs  must  be  gathered  for  use  in 
certain  incantations,  we  are  not  to  suppose  that  our 
elders  used  it  indiscriminately,  or  tumbled  out  their 
words  as  they  would  dice,  trusting  that  luck  or  chance 
would  send  them  a  happy  turn."  Indeed  we  are  not 
to,  and  probably  we  should  not.  So  that  the  warning 
to  us  not  to  think  of  the  age  of  verbal  concetti  as  lin 
guistically  happy-go-lucky  is  less  impressive  than  the 
beautiful  figure  about  the  language  with  the  dew  still 
on  it.  The  passage  could  be  paralleled  every  few 
pages  throughout  the  six  volumes  of  essays.  It  is 
characteristic,  too,  not  only  in  the  superiority  of  figure 
to  idea,  but  in  the  pursuit  of  the  figure  and  its  trans 
formation,  like  the  pursuit  of  the  genie  by  the  princess  in 
the  Second  Calendar's  tale.  This  fecundity  of  fancy 
and  comparative  continence  of  thought  varies  in 
felicity,  however,  as  I  have  said.  "The  nameless  eagle 
of  the  tree  Ygdrasil  was  about  to  sit  at  last,  and  wild- 
eyed  enthusiasts  rushed  from  all  sides,  each  eager  to 
thrust  under  the  mystic  bird  that  chalk  egg  from  which 
the  new  and  fairer  Creation  was  to  be  hatched  in  due 
time,"  is  more  in  the  bouffe  vein  again,  though  graphic. 
And  Lowell's  fecundity  in  figure  by  no  means  precludes 
terseness— though  I  think  it  is  oftener  piquant,  like 
his  wit  in  general.  There  is  nothing  loose  about  his 
lavishness  with  it  and  his  metaphorical  plethora  is  often 
a  succession  of  pointed  petards.  And  though  his  fond 
ness  for  it  becomes  infatuation  at  times,  its  aptness  and 
polish  command  his  intelligent  effort.  No  great  prose 
writer  ever  wrote,  probably,  such  a  sentence  as  the 

322 


LOWELL 

following:  "Bran  had  its  prophets  and  the  presartorial 
simplicity  of  Adam  its  martyrs,  tailored  impromptu 
from  the  tar-pot  by  incensed  neighbors  and  sent  forth 
to  illustrate  the  '  feathered  Mercury '  as  defined  by  Web 
ster  and  Worcester,"  but  it  is  impossible  not  to  discern 
painstaking  in.its  composition.  A  good  deal  of  Lowell's 
prose,  indeed,  has  the  piquancy  of  Pegasus  in  harness. 
But  at  lea^st  it  is  never  prose  poetry.  It  is  masculine, 
direct,  flexible,  and  energetic  prose.  Whatever  ir 
responsibilities  of  taste  he  might  have,  however  ad 
dicted  to  a  kind  of  racy  and  idiomatic  order  of  con 
cetti  and  overfond  of  figure  he  might  be,  however  lack 
ing  his  writing  in  the  larger  rhythm  of  style  and  the  or 
ganic  order  of  composition,  his  essays  are  admirably 
written  from  the  point  of  view  of  adequate,  accurate, 
and  scholarly  prose  expression.  His  poetic  faculty  is 
an  aid,  not  an  embarrassment,  to  him  and  when  he  had 
poetry  to  write  he  wrote  it  in  verse.  His  trained  sense 
and  sound  instinct  secured  him  against  the  mediocrity 
of  inflated  periods  and  ungoverned  emotionality.  He 
aimed  at  no  meretricious  "  effects."  He  was  quite  with 
out  inferiority  of  any  kind,  though  his  partisanship  in 
both  reprehension  and  idolatry  robs  his  writing  now  and 
then  of  that  positive  perfume  of  sensitive  intellectual  re 
finement  in  which  self-respect  and  consideration  seem 
magically  fused;  as  in  Emerson,  for  example.  With 
out  a  tinge  of  austerity,  despite  his  concetti,  and  despite, 
too,  his  wealth  of  literary  allusion,  his  writing  is  ad 
mirably  simple ;  so  far  at  least  as  clearness  is  concerned 
it  is  simplicity  itself.  His  vocabulary  is  extremely  exten- 

323 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

sive,  and  often  extremely  personal,  but  I  think  he  never 
exploits  it.  He  had  no  pedantries.  He  even  belittled 
rather  than  paraded  his  Old  French.  He  was  fond  of 
unusual  words,  no  doubt,  but  for  their  expressive  value, 
and  never  used  them  inaptly  or  as  decoration,  though 
never  restrained  from  taking  advantage  of  their  concise 
and  epitomizing  quality  by  awe  of  philistine  resentment 
at  the  unfamiliar.  When  he  said  such  a  thing  would 
have  "arrided"  Lamb,  he  was  using  Lamb's  own  word, 
and  when  he  speaks  of  "the  hermetic  gift  of  buckling 
wings  to  the  feet  of  their  verse"  he  is  but  pardonably 
mercurial.  At  all  events,  if  he  was  now  and  then 
linguistically  precious  he  was  far  oftener  linguistically 
instructive,  and  always  quite  without  display.  His 
allusions  are  often  recondite,  like  Carlyle's,  though  not, 
like  Carlyle's,  bizarre;  he  lacked  the  edge  as  well  as  the 
irritability  of  extravagance  in  its  intenser  forms,  the 
relief  as  well  as  the  rudeness  of  the  eccentric — save  in 
the  matter  of  taste,  his  offences  against  which  fringe 
the  commonplace  and  are  not  so  eccentric  as  it  is  eccen 
tric  to  commit  them.  His  peculiarity  of  never  ex 
plaining  his  allusions  is  not  affectation.  He  had  none. 
He  is  too  bland,  too  broad,  too  complacent.  It  is 
merely  bookish.  It  does  not  in  the  least  modify  the 
general  effect  of  his  essays  as  lectures  to  students  or  a 
lyceum  public  of  docile  and  deferential  quality,  though 
perhaps  of  a  rather  special  sort.  On  the  contrary,  it 
adds  to  their  air  of  the  academic  close,  peopled  not  by 
representatives  of  the  reading  world  at  large,  nor  even 
by  the  generally  cultivated,  but  by  the  matriculate  and 

324 


LOWELL 

the  novice.  Nor  does  their  style,  spite  of  the  admirable 
qualities  enumerated,  quite  take  them  out  of  this  cate 
gory.  They  will  doubtless  continue  to  be  indispensable 
in  the  college  courses  referred  to  by  Mr.  Greenslet,  and 
certainly  every  one  should  read  them  for  the  instruction 
they  contain,  for  their  literary  saturation.  But  the 
larger  public — so  free,  so  fickle,  so  entirely  irresponsible 
but  also  so  responsive  to  what  is  really  addressed  to  it — 
will  increasingly,  I  think,  turn  to  his  poetry  as  Lowell's 
more  interesting  and  more  admirable  achievement  and 
his  more  genuinely  native  form  of  self-expression. 


VI 

The  qualities  to  be  found  in  his  prose  exist,  of  course, 
in  his  poetry,  but  they  make  a  very  different  thing  of  it. 
It  is  not  to  be  regretted  that,  unlike  Tennyson,  for 
example,  he  did  not  confine  himself  to  poetry.  Not 
only  did  he  write  a  great  deal  of  admirable  and  dis 
tinguished  prose,  not  only  may  we  say,  indeed,  that 
there  is  very  little  of  his  prose  that  is  not  worth  while, 
but  he  wrote  a  good  deal  too  much  verse;  and  verse 
that  misses  the  mark  has  less  to  fall  back  upon  than 
errant  or  superfluous  prose.  If  he  had  consecrated 
himself  completely  to  the  service  of  the  Muse,  we  should 
have  lost  more  than  we  should  have  gained,  and  have 
gained  little  properly  to  be  called  indispensable, 
since  the  proportion  of  his  poetry  that  can  be  so  called 
is  small.  But  a  great  deal  of  it  is  very  fine,  very  noble 
and  at  times  very  beautiful,  and  it  discloses  the  dis- 

325 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

tinctly  poetic  faculty  of  which  rhythmic  and  figurative 
is  native  expression.  It  is  impressionable  rather  than 
imaginative  in  the  larger  sense;  it  is  felicitous  in  detail 
rather  than  in  design;  and  of  a  general  rather  than 
individual,  a  representative  rather  than  original,  in 
spiration.  There  is  a  field  of  poetry,  assuredly  not 
the  highest,  but  ample  and  admirable — in  which  these 
qualities,  more  or  less  unsatisfactory  in  prose,  are 
legitimately  and  fruitfully  exercised.  All  poetry  is  in 
the  realm  of  feeling,  and  thus  less  exclusively  dependent 
on  the  thought  that  is  the  sole  reliance  of  prose.  Being 
genuine  poetry,  Lowell's  profits  by  this  advantage. 
Feeling  is  fitly,  genuinely,  its  inspiration.  Its  range 
and  limitations  correspond  to  the  character  of  his  sus 
ceptibility  as  those  of  his  prose  do  to  that  of  his  thought. 
The  fusion  of  the  two  in  the  crucible  of  the  imagination 
is  infrequent  with  him,  because  with  him  sense  impres 
sions  are  more  vivacious  than  the  imagination  is  luxuri 
ant  and  highly  developed.  Without,  of  course,  Emer 
son's  fragmentariness,  it  nevertheless,  cannot  be  claimed 
that  for  the  architectonics  of  poetry  he  had  notably 
the  requisite  reach  and  grasp,  the  comprehensive  and 
constructing  vision.  Few  of  his  compositions  have  any 
large  design  or  effective  interdependent  proportions. 
In  a  technical  way  an  exception  should  be  noted  in  his 
skilful  building  of  the  ode— a  form  in  which  he  was 
extremely  successful  and  for  which  he  evidently  had 
a  native  aptitude.  His  sonnets  are  less  happy — some 
of  them,  in  fact,  curiously  routine  and  mechanical  for 
so  energetic  a  spirit.  But  the  ode  is  a  comparatively 

326 


LOWELL 

loose  construction — witness  the  unrivalled  success  in  it 
of  the  author  of  "the  slipshod  'Endymion,'  "  as  Keats 
agrees  with  his  reviewer  in  calling  it,  and  the  frag 
mentary  "Hyperion."  Of  such  a  poem  as  the  "In 
Memoriam"  or  "Evangeline,"  or  even  "Snow  Bound," 
Lowell  is  incapable.  The  "  Legend  of  Brittany  "  is  full 
of  charming  and  touching  poetry,  but  it  has  far  less 
structure,  less  definition  and  coherence,  less  movement 
and  evolution,  than  the  "Isabella  and  the  Pot  of  Basil," 
in  which  Keats  has  been  charged  with  drowning  all 
the  crispness  of  Boccaccio.  Keats,  however,  loses  his 
structure  in  a  surfeit  of  imaginative  surplusage.  In 
Lowell  it  is  the  imagination  itself  that  is  lacking, 
though  in  nearly  every  stanza  his  impressionability 
makes  a  brave  struggle  to  cover  its  defection  with  genu 
ine  felicities. 

The  " Legend''  is  an  extremely  characteristic  poem. 
Like  the  "Vision  of  Sir  Launfal,"  with  its  charming 
nature  detail,  it  not  only  fails  in  design,  failing  to  bring 
out  effectively  the  design  supplied  by  the  legend  itself, 
but  it  fails  in  characterization;  the  figures  are  not  alive; 
in  spite  of  considerable  elaboration  they  are  not  even 
distinct.  A  sort  of  couche  of  moralizing — oddly  un- 
Breton — overlays  the  poem,  while,  singularly,  there  is 
not  enough  intensity  in  the  treatment  to  make  the 
tragedy  stern.  Intensity,  in  fact,  is  wholly  foreign  to 
Lowell's  temperament,  and  his  poetry  suffers  accord 
ingly  in  this  respect  more  than  in  almost  any  other. 
His  lack  of  passion — almost  droll  in  so  convinced  a 
partisan — is  so  pronounced  as  to  amount  well-nigh  to 

327 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

dispassionateness.  Naturally,  the  entire  gamut  of 
emotions  excluded  by  a  rectitude  of  feeling  paralleling 
his  regularity  of  thought  is  without  his  range  and  he 
could  not  be  expected  to  "  break  his  heart  in  verse  every 
six  months."  But  even  where  his  feeling  is  lofty  it  is 
rarely  exalted,  and  where  it  is  profound  it  is  not  intense. 
The  "lyric  cry"  is  not  to  be  heard  in  his  poetic  domin 
ions,  where  the  curfew  of  calm  replaces  it  with  its  placid 
toll.  Sentiment,  in  a  word,  replaces  passion — in  quite 
eighteenth-century  fashion  one  would  be  tempted  to  say 
but  for  its  conspicuous  genuineness  and  often  truly 
Wordsworthian  melody.  Cowper's  and  Cowley's  at 
least  one  may  call  its  congeners,  rather  than  the  in- 
tenser  strain  of  nineteenth-century  verse  at  its  flood. 
"Auf  Wiedersehen,"  for  example,  is  a  charming  poem, 
but  compare  it  with  the  stanzas  "  In  Switzerland "  con 
cluding  with 

"The  unplumbed,  salt,  estranging  sea." 
Its  best,  its  most  characteristic  line  is  the  admirable  one, 
"The  turf  that  silences  the  lane," 

in  which  nature  asserts  her  primacy  in  the  poet's  re 
flections  and  inspires  him  with  a  felicity  his  mistress 
cannot  evoke.  "The  First  Snowfall,"  too,  is  exquisite, 
but  it  does  not  strive  nor  cry.  It  expresses  bereave 
ment  touchingly.  But  it  is  on  the  natural  picture  with 

"The  stiff  rails  softened  to  swan's-down" 

that  the  poetic  stress  falls. 

328 


LOWELL 

For  nature,  however,  Lowell  did  have  a  feeling  justly 
to  be  called  passion.  His  passions,  as  I  have  said,  may 
be  summed  up  in  nature,  books,  and  patriotism,  and  it 
is  precisely  the  first  and.  the  last  of  these  that  provide 
motives  for  song  which  in  their  in  tensest  expression  re 
tain  still  something  of  the  abstract  and  impersonal,  and 
in  their  loftier  and  broader  statement  express  the  uni 
versal  rather  than  the  particular.  No  one  is  a  stranger 
to  the  meaning,  however  he  may  be  to  the  experiences, 
of  patriotism.  And  poetry  at  the  present  day  can  say 
little  to  him  to  whom  nature  says  nothing.  These  two 
sources  of  poetic  inspiration  are  therefore  especially 
germane  to  the  genius  of  a  poet  like  Lowell,  who  had 
no  general  point  of  view  of  his  own,  no  personal  "mes 
sage"  to  deliver,  but  whose  gift  of  expression  was  fully 
exercised,  in  all  its  rich  luxuriance,  in  expressing  the 
thoughts  and  feelings  of  his  fellow-men.  To  sing  one's 
country  and  its  landscape,  one  does  not  need  a  "specu 
lative  side."  And  impressionability  as  sensitive  as 
Lowell's  does  duty  here  very  efficiently  for  the  imagina 
tion.  He  was  extremely  sensitive  to  all  out-of-door 
aspects  and  influences.  If  he  did  not  read  Words 
worth's  pantheism  into  nature's  phenomena,  he  ob 
served  them  with  a  loving  sentiment  that  eliminates  all 
traces  of  vagueness  and  gives  a  crisp  and  definite  report 
of  them  guaranteeing  its  own  genuineness  and  forming 
an  authentic  basis  for  the  delight  with  which  they  filled 
him  and  which  flowers  in  indubitably  poetic  characteri 
zation.  His  ingrained  predilection  for  the  figurative 
in  language,  so  excessive  in  his  prose,  stands  him  in  good 

329 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

stead  here.  In  verse  his  figures  add  to  their  invariable 
aptness  a  truly  poetic  charm.  He  carries  his  beloved 
Shakespeare  out-of-doors  with  him  and  speaks  thus  of 
the  treachery  of  spring,  in  lines  which  have  more  style 
than  all  his  prose  contains,  and  which,  like  the  lion  on 
the  flag  of  the  Persian  poet,  "  move  and  march  "  in  the 
sustained  souffle  that  style  is : 

"And  winter  suddenly,  like  crazy  Lear, 
Reels  back  and  brings  the  dead  May  in  his  arms, 
Her  budding  breasts  and  wan  dislustred  front 
With  frosty  streaks  and  drifts  of  his  white  beard 
All  overblown/' 

"What  is  so  rare  as  a  day  in  June"?  Such  poetry 
about  it  as  this: 

"The  little  bird  sits  at  his  door  in  the  sun, 
Atilt  like  a  blossom  among  the  leaves, 
And  lets  his  illumined  being  o'errun, 
With  the  deluge  of  summer  it  receives." 

Nature  is  usually  animate  with  him.  The  birds  sing 
in  the  branches.  Sunshine  vivifies  the  fields  and 
thrills  the  woods  it  filters  through.  The  breeze  blows. 
Life  and  motion  are  everywhere.  Shelley  and  Words 
worth  have  not  more  worthily  immortalized  the  sky 
lark  than  Lowell  has  the  bobolink,  its  New  England 
congener.  Who  that  has  ever  seen  this  embodiment  of 
sportiveness  at  play  in  the  zephyrs  can  forget  the  lines : 

"Half-hid  on  tip-top  apple-blooms  he  swings, 
Or  climbs  against  the  breeze  with  quiverin'  wings, 
Or,  givin'  way  to't  in  a  mock  despair, 
Runs  down,  a  brook  o'  laughter,  thru  the  air"? 

330 


LOWELL 

Joy  is  the  sentiment  that  chiefly  nature  inspires  in  him. 
It  is  the  birch-tree,  not  the  weeping-willow  that  he 
celebrates,  and  that  might  almost  be  taken  as  the  symbol 
of  his  nature  poetry,  with  its  crispness,  its  delicacy,  its 
New  England  color  and  substance,  its  alert  grace,  its 
antitropical  allure,  its  independence  and  breezy  self- 
sufficiency.  With  the  awful,  the  majestic,  the  solemn 
and  sublime  aspects  of  nature,  her  immensities  of 
space  and  stillness  and  the  drama  of  her  storms  and 
wilder  moods,  he  is  less  in  touch.  Her  more  familiar 
and  more  benign  aspects  appeal  to  him  as  the  New 
England  poet  which  he  was  and — being  without  a  trace 
of  affectation — was  necessarily.  The  huckleberry-bush 
has  not  quite  the  same  suggestiveness  as  the  laurel,  the 
vine,  and  the  fig-tree,  but  it  has  indefeasibly  its  own 
poetic  potentialities,  and  these  and  their  kindred  found 
in  Lowell  an  exquisite  as  well  as  an  eloquent,  a  sensitive 
as  well  as  a  veridical,  expositor.  Lowell's  constitutes, 
on  the  whole,  the  most  admirable  American  contri 
bution  to  the  nature  poetry  of  English  literature — far 
beyond  that  of  Bryant,  Whittier,  or  Longfellow,  I  think, 
and  only  occasionally  matched  here  and  there  by  the 
magic  touch  of  Emerson,  who  had  a  " speculative  side." 
And  his  patriotic  poetry  is  altogether  unmatched — 
even  unrivalled.  It  is  the  loftiest  expression  of  the 
American  muse  singing  America,  and  in  virtue  of  it  she 
stands  shoulder  to  shoulder  with  her  English  sister  in 
her  most  inspired  moments.  Shakespeare's 

"This  precious  stone  set  in  the  silver  sea, 
This  blessed  plot,  this  earth,  this  realm,  this  England — " 

331 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

is  no  better  than  some  of  the  lines — some  entire  strophes 
even — of  the  "Commemoration  Ode,"  either  as  patriot 
ism  or  as  poetry.  The  ode  is  too  long,  its  evolution  is 
defective,  it  contains  verbiage,  it  preaches.  But  pas 
sages  of  it — the  most  famous  having  characteristically 
been  interpolated  after  its  delivery— are  equal  to  any 
thing  of  the  kind.  The  temptation  to  quote  from  it  is 
hard  to  withstand.  It  is  the  cap-sheaf  of  Lowell's 
achievement.  The  Agassiz  Ode  perhaps  deserves  a 
proximate  place— friendship  was  a  harmonious  in 
spiration  for  Lowell;  and  the  "Biglow  Papers"  are 
doubtless  more  nearly  unique — are  unique,  in  fact,  as 
well  as  highly  characteristic;  as  characteristic  as  the  ex 
traordinary  tour  de  force,  the  sustained  jeu  d'esprit  of 
his  youth,  "A  Fable  for  Critics,"  the  boufie  rhymes  in 
which  are  as  good— nearly — as  Byron's,  and  which  in  a 
certain  opulence  of  spirit  he  never  surpassed.  But  the 
"Biglow  Papers"  equal  the  " Commemoration  Ode" 
neither  as  poetry  nor  as  patriotism.  They  contain  some 
very  beautiful  poetry,  as  well  as  a  sufficient  amount  of 
rather  light  doggerel.  They  are  a  treasury  of  both  wit 
and  humor,  though  now  and  then  the  humor  is  over 
done.  The  idea  was  a  trouvaille,  but  it  is  overworked. 
The  second  series  justifies  itself  amply,  but  it  has  less 
spontaneity  than  the  first;  and  it  is  not  only  oc 
casionally  labored,  but  it  is  frankly  and  loosely  partisan, 
the  scales  not  being  held  with  anything  like  the  steadi 
ness  that  they  are  in  "The  Bridge  and  the  Moniment," 
for  example.  With  all  his  Americanism  Lowell  was 
scarcely  less  essentially,  than  he  was — as  he  was  fond 

332 


LOWELL 

of  insisting — ancestrally,  English.  New  England  was 
not  so  named  for  nothing.  And  if  it  has  been  our  best 
section — as  in  the  literary  sense  it  certainly  has  been — 
it  has  certainly  also  been,  even  in  the  literary  sense,  the 
most  sectional.  The  "Biglow  Papers"  contain  some 
very  incisive  criticisms  of  England,  but  they  are  not 
bitter  or  unjust,  and  when  their  author  became  min 
ister  to  England  Englishmen  found  it  easy  to  ad 
mire  their  sometime  censor,  assured  that  fundamen 
tally  he  returned  their  admiration.  The  quarrel  was 
a  family  one.  On  the  other  hand,  his  own  fellow-coun 
trymen  south  of  Mason  and  Dixon's  line  were  even 
more  bitterly  than  incisively  satirized  in  the  "Biglow 
Papers."  They  were  in  the  political  articles  which  fill 
a  volume  of  his  complete  works  and  which,  save  the 
paper  on  Lincoln,  are  only  of  historic  interest,  having 
only  a  temporary  value.  They  contain  enough  "good 
things"  perhaps  to  explain  his  wish  to  perpetuate  them 
—though  even  these  are  apt  to  run  speedily  to  seed; 
witness  the  extraordinary  play  upon  the  name  of  John 
Bell,  the  Tennessee  statesman,  kept  up  for  a  page  and 
a  half.  Otherwise  they  are  quite  negligible  as  the 
thoroughly  partisan  polemic  of  the  journalist,  or  at 
most  the  pamphleteer,  rather  than  the  publicist,  and 
saturated  with  the  sectional  spirit.  And  it  was,  in  part 
at  least,  precisely  the  absence  of  this  spirit  in  Lincoln, 
for  example,  that  led  Lowell  to  characterize  him  as  "  the 
first  American."  Lowell's  patriotism  has  undoubtedly 
this  restriction. 

His  democracy  is  similarly  restricted.     He  said  some 
333 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

admirable  things  about  democracy  in  his  famous  ad 
dress  to  a  public  instinctively  devoted  to  the  principle 
of  caste;  he  could  hardly  fail  to  call  their  attention  to 
points  they  notoriously  overlooked.  But  he  was  him 
self  a  Brahmin  throughout,  whereas  the  American  demo 
cratic  ideal  is  Brahminism  in  manners  and  tastes,  not  in 
sympathies  and  ideas.  From  the  democratic  point  of 
view,  either  philosophic  or  enthusiastic,  his  convic 
tions  about  its  being  "the  duty  of  the  intelligent  to 
govern  the  less  intelligent,"  and  about  popular  govern 
ment  being  "no  better  than  any  other  form  except  as 
the  virtue  and  wisdom  of  the  people  make  it  so,"  etc., 
must  seem  rather  flat,  I  think.  It  is  like  the  defenders 
of  the  spoils  system  objecting  to  civil  service  examina 
tions  and  insisting  on  the  old  idea  of  "appointing  only 
good  men  to  office."  He  had  very  much  the  political 
philosophy  of  Halifax  or  Macaulay  plus  a  belief  in  the 
New  England  town  meeting,  which  admirable  insti 
tution  unhappily  has  its  limitations  of  application. 
But  when  his  patriotism  abandoned  polemic  and  soared 
into  the  loftier  regions  of  emotion,  with  only  the  broader 
and  simpler  of  our  truths  and  triumphs  for  a  basis,  he 
was  superb.  Who  associates  the  stately  measures  and 
noble  figures  of  "The  Present  Crisis"  with  the  Mex 
ican  War?  And  in  the  "Commemoration  Ode"  he 
reaches,  if  he  does  not  throughout  maintain,  his  own 
"  clear-ethered  height, "  and  his  verse  has  the  elevation 
of  ecstasy  and  the  splendor  of  the  sublime. 

"O  Beautiful!     My  Country!  ours  once  more! 
Smoothing  thy  gold  of  war-dishevelled  hair 

334 


LOWELL 

O'er  such  sweet  brows  as  never  other  wore, 
And  letting  thy  set  lips, 
Freed  from  wrath's  pale  eclipse, 

The  rosy  edges  of  their  smile  lay  bare." 

We  can  ask  the  world  to  match  that.  If  Lowell  had  no 
personal  "  message "  to  deliver,  in  this  magnificent 
poem  he  phrases  ours  to  the  world,  and  in  the  most  ex 
plicit  and  authentic  terms  of  beautiful  and  moving 
poetry.  He  will  doubtless  cease  to  be  one  of  our 
superstitions,  but  he  will  always  remain  one  of  our  chief 
glories. 


335 


HENEY  JAMES 


HENRY  JAMES 

j  .  .    ,          , 

IF  any  career  can  be  called  happy  before  it  is  closed, 
that  of  Mr.  Henry  James  may  certainly  be  so  called. 
It  has  been  a  long  one — much  longer  already  than  the 
space  of  time  allotted  to  a  generation.  It  has  been  quite 
free  from  any  kind  of  mistake :  there  is  probably  nothing 
in  it  he  would  change  if  he  could,  except  what  he  has 
been  abundantly  able  to  by  a  careful  revision  of  his 
fiction  for  the  definitive  New  York  Edition,  in  which  he 
has  made  it  quite  as  he  would  have  it.  His  career  has 
been  an  honorable  one  in  a  very  special  way  and  to  a 
very  marked  degree.  Hehas  scrupulously  followed 
his  ideal.  Neither  necessity  nor  opportunity  has  pre 
vented  him  from  doing,  apparently,  just  what  he  wanted. 
He  has  never,  at  any  rate,  yielded  to  the  temptation  to 
give  the  public  what  it  wanted.  The  rewards  of  so  do 
ing  are  very  great.  Most  writers  in  belittling  them  would 
be  justly  suspected  of  affectation.  They  include,  for  ex 
ample,  the  pleasure  of  being  read,  and  this  is  a  pleasure 
usually  so  difficult  to  forego  when  it  is  attainable  that 
Mr.  James's  indifference  to  it  is  striking.  And— what  is 
still  more  striking — he  has  never,  as  he  himself  expresses 
it  somewhere  in  characterization  of  some  other  writer, — 
who  must,  however,  have  been  his  own  inferior  in  this 

339 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

respect, — he  has  never  "saved  for  his  next  book."  Of 
his  special  order  of  talent  fecundity  is  not  what  one 
would  naturally  have  predicted,  and  though  he  has 
amply  demonstrated  his  possession  of  it,  he  must  have 
long  given  us  his  best  before  he  could  have  been  at  all 
sure  that  he  could  count  on  matching  his  best  to  an  in 
definite  extent.  Into  the  frame  of  every  book  he  has 
packed,  not  only  the  substance  called  for  by  the  subject, 
but  a  substance  as  remarkable  for  containing  all  he  could 
himself  bring  to  it,  as  for  compression.  At  least,  if  his 
substance  has  sometimes  been  thin,  it  has  always  been 
j  considered ;  however  fine-spun  its  texture,  it  has  always 
been  composed  of  thought.  And  his  expression,  tenuous 
as  it  may  sometimes  appear,  is  (especially,  indeed, 
when  its  tenuity  is  greatest)  so  often  dependent  for  its 
comprehension  on  what  it  suggests  rather  than  on  what 
it  states  as  to  compel  the  inference  that  it  is  incomplete 
expression,  after  all,  of  the  amount  of  thought  behind  it. 
So  that  he  never  leaves  the  impression  of  super 
ficiality.  His  material,  even  his  result,  may  be  as  slight 
as  his  own  insistent  predetermination  can  make  it;  it 
is  impossible  not  to  feel  that  it  is  the  work  of  an  artist 
who  is  not  only  serious,  but  profound,  feehind  his 
sketch  you  feel  the  careful  and  elaborate  preliminary 
study;)  back  of  his  triviality  you  feel  the  man  of  reflec 
tion.  And  this  is  not  at  all  because  his  triviality — to 
call  it  such — is  significant  in  itself.  It  often  is,  and  the 
trifling  feature,  incident,  movement,  or  phrase  often 
has  a  typical  value  that  makes  it  in  effect  but  the  ex 
pression  of  a  larger  thing  than  it  embodies.  But  often, 

340 


HENRY  JAMES 

on  the  other  hand,  it  is  difficult  to  assign  any  strikingly 
interpretative  or  illustrative  value  to  the  insubstantial 
phenomena  that  he  is  at  the  pains  of  observing  so  nar 
rowly  and  recording  so  .copiously.  And  yet  it  can  occur 
to  no  sensitive  and  candid  intelligence  to  refer  to  the 
capacity  of  the  recorder  this  flimsiness  of  the  record. 
One  has  the  sense  in  the  treatment,  the  technic,  of  a 
firm  and  vigorous  hand — such  as  is,  in  general,  perhaps, 
needed  for  the  carving  of  "e*maux  et  came'es."  And 
still  more  in  the  substance  one  perceives,  as  well  as 
argues,  the  solidity  and  dignity  underlying  the  super 
ficial  and  apparently  insignificant  details  with  which 
"  wonderfully  "—to  use  a  favorite  word  of  Mr.  James— 
they  are  occupied.  The  sense  of  contrast  is  indeed  often 
piquant.  Cuvier  lecturing  on  a  single  bone  and  recon 
structing  the  entire  skeleton  from  it  is  naturally  im 
pressive,  but  Mr.  James  often  presents  the  spectacle  of 
a  Cuvier  absorbed  in  the  positive  fascinations  of  the 
single  bone  itself, — yet  plainly  preserving  the  effect  of  a 
Cuvier  the  while.  If,  in  a  word,  his  work  sometimes 
seems  superficial,  it  never  seems  the  work  of  a  super 
ficial  personality;  and  the  exasperation  of  some  of  his 
unfriendly  critics  proceeds  from  wondering,  not  so 
much  how  a  writer  who  has  produced  such  substantial, 
can  also  produce  such  trifling,  work,  as  how  the  writer 
whose  very  treatment  of  triviality  shows  him  to  be 
serious  can  be  so  interested  in  the  superficial. 

The  explanation,  I  think,  is  that  to  Mr.  James  him 
self  life,  considered  as  artistic  material,  is  so  serious 
and  so  significant  that  nothing  it  contains  seems  trivial 

341 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

to  him.  And  as  artistic  material  is,  in  fact,  the  only  way 
in  which  he  appears  to  consider  it  at  all.  In  spite  of 
his  elaborations  on  occasion,  there  is  no  padding  in  his 
books,  no  filling  in  of  general  ideas  or  other  interesting 
distention.  His  parentheses  are,  it  is  true,  apt  to  be 
cognate  digressions  rather  than  nuances  of  the  matter 
in  hand.  But  that  is  a  question  of  style,  and  in  any 
case  addiction  to  parentheses  is  apt  to  proceed  from 
an  unwillingness  to  stray  very  far  from  the  matter  in 
hand,  to  let  go  one's  hold  of  it.  And  save  for  his 
parentheses,  Mr.  James  holds  his  reader  to  the  mat 
ter — or  the  absence  of  matter — in  hand  rather  re 
morselessly.  One  would  like  more  space,  more  air. 
His  copiousness,  too,  is  the  result  of  his  seriousness.  If 
he  eschews  the  foreign,  he  revels  in  the  pertinent;  and, 
f  pertinence  being  his  sole  standard  of_gxclusion,  he 
is  bound  to  include  much  that  isjriyjal.  We  have  the 
paradox  of  an  art  attitude  that  is  immaculate  with  an 
art  product  that  is  ineffective.  It  is  as  crowded  with 
detail  and  as  tight  as  a  pre-Raphaelite  picture,  because 
there  are  no  salutary  sacrifices.  It  is  not  because  he  is 
a  man,  but  because  he  is  an  artist,  that  nothing  human 
is  foreign  to  him.  No  rectitude  was  ever  less  partial  or 
more  passionless.  No  novelist  ever  evinced  more  pro 
found  respect  for  his  material  as  material,  or  conformed 
his  art  more  rigorously  to  its  characteristic  expression. 
Thus  it  is  due  to  his  seriousness  that  a  good  deal  of  his 
substance  seems  less  significant  to  his  readers  than  to 
him,  both  in  itself  and  because  (out  of  his  own  deep 
respect  for  it,  doubtless)  he  does  little  or  nothing  to  en- 

342 


HENRY  JAMES 

hance  its  interest  and  importance.  It  is  not  commonly 
appreciated  that  his  work  is,  after  all,  the  quintessence 
of  realism. 

II 

The  successive  three  "  manners"  of  the  painters  have 
been  found  in  it.  Mr.  James  has  had,  at  any  rate,  two. 
There  is  a  noteworthy  difference  between  his  earlier 
and  his  later  fiction,  though  the  period  of  transition  be 
tween  them  is  not  very  definite  as  a  period.  Perhaps 
"The  Tragic  Muse"  comprises  it.  He  has,  however, 
thrown  himself  so  devotedly  into  his  latest  phase  as  to 
make  everything  preceding  it  appear  as  the  stages  of  an 
evolution.  Tendencies,  nevertheless,  in  his  earlier  work, 
marked  enough  to  individualize  it  sharply,  have  de 
veloped  until  they  have  subdued  all  other  character 
istics,  and  have  made  of  him  perhaps  the  most  individual 
novelist  of  his  day,  who  at  the  same  time  is  also  in  the 
current  of  its  tendency,— Meredith  (except,  should  one 
say,  in  regard  to  Woman?)  standing  quite  apart  from 
this  in  eminent  isolation.  It  is  through  these  tendencies, 
developed  as  they  have  been,  that  in  virtue  of  originality 
as  well  as  of  excellence  he  has  won  his  particular  place 
in  the  hierarchy  of  fiction.  He  has  created  a  genre  of  his 
own.  He  has  the  distinction  that  makes  the  scientist 
a  savant;  he  has  contributed  something  to  the  sum,  the 
common  stock.  His  distinction  has  really  a  scientific  as 
pect,  independent,  that  is  to  say,  of  quality,  of  intrinsic 
merit.  If  it  should  be  asserted  that  Meredith  has  done 
the  same  thing,— in  a  way,  too,  not  so  very  differently,— 

343 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

it  can  be  replied  that  he  has  done  so  by  weakening  the 
correspondence  of  fiction  to  life,  whereas  Mr.  James  has 
striven  hard  for  its  intensification;  it  is  not  the  con 
struction  of  the  scientific  toy,  however  interesting  it 
may  be,  and  however  much  science  there  may  be  in  it, 
that  makes  the  savant.  This  flowering  of  Mr.  James's 
tendencies  has,  in  fact,  been  precisely  what  he  conceives 
to  be  the  achievement  of  a  more  and  more  intimate  and 
exquisite  correspondence  with  life  in  his  art.  This  at 
least  has  been  his  conscious,  his  professed  aim.  His 
observation,  always  his  master  faculty,  has  grown  more 
and  more  acute,  his  concentration  upon  the  apprehensi 
ble  phenomena  of  the  actual  world  of  men  and  women 
— and  children — closer,  his  interest  in  producing  his  il 
lusion  by  reproducing  these  in  as  nearly  as  possible  their 
actual  essence  and  actual  relations,  far  more  absorbing 
and  complete.  Indeed,  he  has  been  so  interested  in 
producing  his  illusion  in  precisely  this  way,  that  he  has 
decidedly  compromised,  I  think,  the  certainty  of  pro 
ducing  it  at  all. 

He  has  parted,  then,  with  his  past, —the  past,  let  us 
say,  of  "The  Portrait  of  a  Lady,"— in  the  pursuit  of  a 
more  complete  illusion  of  nature  than  he  could  feel  that 
he  achieved  on  his  old  lines,— the  old  lines,  let  us  add, 
observed  in  the  masterpieces  of  fiction  hitherto.  It  is 
true  that  his  observation  has  been  from  the  first  so 
clearly  his  distinguishing  faculty  that  his  present  practice 
may  superficially  seem  to  differ  from  his  former  merely 
in  degree.  But  a  little  more  closely  considered,  it  is  a 
matter  rather  of  development  than  of  augmentation. 

344 


HENRY  JAMES 

In  the  course  of  its  exercise  his  talent  has  been  trans 
formed.  He  has  reversed  the  relation  between  his  ob 
servation  and  his  imagination,  and  instead  of  using  the 
former  to  supply  material  for  the  latter,  has  enlisted 
the  latter  very  expressly — oh!  sometimes,  indeed, 
worked  it  very  hard — in  the  service  of  his  observation. 
Of  what  he  might  have  achieved  by  pursuing  a  different 
course,  I  cannot  myself  think  without  regret.  But  in 
stead  of  seeking  that  equilibrium  of  one's  powers  which 
seems  particularly  pertinent  to  the  expression  of  pre 
cisely  such  an  organization  as  his, — instead  of,  to  that 
end,  curbing  his  curiosity  and  cultivating  his  construc 
tive,  his  reflective,  his  imaginative  side,  the  one  being 
already  markedly  preponderant  and  the  other  com 
paratively  slender, — he  has  followed  the  path  of  tem 
peramental  preference  and  developed  his  natural  bent. 
The  result  is  his  present  eminence,  which  is,  in  conse 
quence,  undeniably  more  nearly  unique,  but  which 
is  not  for  that  reason  necessarily  more  distinguished. 
His  art  has  thus  become,  one  is  inclined  to  say,  the 
ordered  exploitation  of  his  experiences.  The  change 
from  his  earlier  manner  is  so  great  that  it  constitutes,  as 
I  say,  a  transformation.  It  is  somewhat  as  if  a  tran- 
scendentalist  philosopher  should  become  so  enamored 
of  truth  as,  rinding  it  inexhaustibly  manifested  in  every 
thing,  to  fall  in  love  with  phenomena  and  gradually 
acquire  an  absolutely  a  posteriori  point  of  view.  Simi 
larly,  Mr.  James  may  be  said  to  have  renounced  the 
vision  for  the  pursuit. 

The  most  delicate,  the  most  refined  and  elegant  of 
345 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

contemporary  romancers  has  thus  become  the  most 
thoroughgoing  realist  of  even  current  fiction.  It  is  but 
a  popular  error  to  confound  realism  with  grossness,  and 
it  is  his  complete  exclusion  of  idealism  and  preoccupa 
tion  with  the  objective  that  I  have  in  mind  in  speaking  of 
his  realism  as  so  marked;  though  of  recent  years  he  has 
annexed  the  field  of  grossness  also, — cultivating  it,  of 
course,  with  particular  circumspection, — and  thus 
rounded  out  his  domain.  It  must  be  granted  that  his 
realism  does  not  leave  a  very  vivid  impression  of  reality, 
on  the  one  hand,  and  that,  on  the  other,  it  does  not  al 
ways  produce  the  effect  of  a  very  close  correspondence 
to  actual  life  and  character.  "The  Spoils  of  Poynton," 
with  its  inadequate  motive  and  aspiration  after  the 
tragic;  "The  Other  House,"  with  its  attempt  to  domes 
ticate  melodrama;  "In  the  Cage,"  with  its  exclusion 
of  all  the  surrounding  data,  needed  to  give  authenticity 
to  an  even  robuster  theme;  "The  Awkward  Age,"  with 
its  impossible  cleverness  of  stupid  people,  are,  as  pict 
ures  of  life,  neither  very  lifelike  nor  very  much  alive. 
But  that  is  a  matter  of  artistic  result.  The  attitude  of 
the  artist  is  plainly,  uncompromisingly  realistic.  It  is 
the  real  with  which  his  fancy,  his  imaginativeness,  is 
exclusively  preoccupied.  To  discover  new  and  unsus 
pected  phenomena  in  its  psychology  is  the  aim  of  his 
divination  as  well  as  of  his  scrutiny.  The  ideal  counter 
part  of  the  real  and  the  actual  which  even  such  realists 
as  Thackeray  and  George  Eliot  have  constantly,  how 
ever  unconsciously,  in  mind,  and  the  image  of  which, 
whether  or  no  as  universal  as  the  Platonic  philosophy 

346 


HENRY   JAMES 

pretends,  is  at  least  part  of  the  material  of  the  imagina 
tive  artist, — furnishing  more  or  less  vaguely  the  stand 
ard  by  which  he  admeasures  both  his  own  creation  and 
its  model,  when  he  has  one,— this  ideal  counterpart,  so 
to  speak,  is  curiously  absent  from  Mr.  James's  con 
templation.  Given  a  character  with  certain  traits,  sug 
gested,  no  doubt,  by  certain  specific  experiences,  its 
action  is  not  deduced  by  ideal  logic,  but  arrived  at 
through  induction  from  the  artist's  entire  stock  of  per 
tinent  general  experience,  and  modelled  by  its  insistent 
pressure.  "What  conduct  does  my — rather  unusual — 
experience  lead  me  to  expect  of  a  personage  constituted 
thus  and  so,  in  such  and  such  circumstances?" — one 
may  imagine  Mr.  James  reflecting. 

Categories  like  realism  and  idealism  are  but  con 
venient,  and  not  exact,  and  in  the  practice  of  any  artist 
both  inspirations  must  be  alternately  present  in  the 
execution  of  detail,  though  one  of  them  is  surely  apt  to 
preponderate  in  the  general  conception  and  in  the  ar 
tist's  attitude.  But  it  is  certainly  true  that  what  may 
be  called  the  ideal  of  realism  has  never  been  held  more 
devoutly— not  even  by  Zola— than  it  is  by  Mr.  James. 
All  his  subtlety,  his  refinement,  his  extreme  plasticity, 
his  acquaintance  with  the  academic  as  well  as  the 
actual,  are  at  the  service  of  truth,  and  that  order  of 
truth  which  is  to  be  discovered  rather  than  divined. 
Long  ago,  in  speaking  of  George  Sand's  idealism, 
which  he  admitted  to  be  "very  beautiful,"  he  observed: 
"  Something  even  better  in  a  novelist  is  that  tender  ap 
preciation  of  actuality  which  makes  even  the  applica- 

347 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

tion  of  a  single  coat  of  rose-color  seem  an  act  of  vio 
lence."  The  inspiration  is  a  little  different  from 
Thackeray's  "If  truth  is  not  always  pleasant,  at  least 
it  is  best."  It  is  more  "  artistic,"  perhaps,  certainly 
more  disinterested.  And  at  the  present  day  Mr.  James 
would  no  doubt  go  farther,  omit  the  word  "  tender," 
and  for  "rose-color"  substitute  simply  "any  color  at 
all."  It  is  an  unselfish  creed,  one  may  remark  in  pass 
ing.  Color  is  a  variety  of  form,  and  it  is  a  commonplace 
that  form  is  the  only  passport  to  posterity.  Moreover, 
as  Mr.  James  concedes,  even  idealism  at  times  is  "  very 
beautiful,"  and  to  be  compelled  to  forego  beauty  in 
"appreciation  of  the  actual"  (for  its  actuality,  that  is 
to  say,  rather  than  its  beauty)  must  for  an  artist  be  a 
rigorous  renunciation. 

Mr.  James  has  renounced  it  for  the  most  part  with 
admirable  consistency,  and  his  latest  works  are,  in  effort 
and  inspiration  at  least,  the  very  apotheosis  of  the  actual 
— however  their  absence  of  color  or  other  elements  of 
form  and  the  encumbrances  of  their  style  (the  distinc 
tion  is  his  own)  may  fail  to  secure  the  desired  effect  of 
actuality  for  them.  What  Maisie  knew,  for  example, 
may  seem  to  have  been  learned  by  a  preternaturally 
precocious  child,  so  that  her  actuality  has  not,  perhaps, 
the  relief  desired  by  her  author.  But  she  can  have  no 
other  raison  d'etre — for  the  supposition  that  even  in 
cidentally  she  is  designed  to  illustrate  the  charm  of  the 
flower  on  the  dunghill  can  be  at  best  but  a  mere  guess, 
so  colorlessly  is  the  assumed  actuality  of  her  precocity 
and  extraordinary  situation  exhibited.  The  book,  in- 

348 


HENRY   JAMES 

deed,  in  this  respect  is  a  masterpiece  of  reserve.  It  is 
conspicuously  free  from  any  taint  of  rose-color.  And 
in  its  suppression  of  the  superfluous — such  as  even  the 
remotest  recognition  of  the  pathos  of  Maisie's  situation 
— it  is  an  excellent  illustration  of  an  order  of  art  that 
must  be  radically  theoretic,  since  it  could  not  be  the 
instinctive  and  spontaneous  expression  of  a  normally 
humane  motive. 

Ill 

The  truth  is  that  our  fiction  is  in  a  period  of  transition, 
which  perhaps  is  necessarily  hostile  to  spontaneity  and 
favorable  to  the  artificial.  We  speculate  so  much  as 
to  whether  fiction  is  "a  finer  art"  as  practised  by  the  lit 
tle,  than  it  was  in  the  day  of  the  great,  masters,  that  the 
present  time  may  fairly  be  called  the  reign  of  theory  in 
fiction — as  indeed  it  is  in  art  of  any  kind.  And  Mr. 
James's  art  is  in  nothing  more  modern  than  in  being 
theoretic.  Whatever  it  is  not,  it  is  that.  Difficult  as, 
in  many  respects,  it  is  to  characterize,  it  is  plainly  what 
it  is  by  precise  intention,  by  system.  Difficult  as  his 
theory  is  to  define,  it  is  perfectly  clear  that  his  art  is  the 
product  of  it.  It  is,  in  a  word,  a  critical  product.  And 
it  is  so  because  his  temperament  is  the  critical  tempera 
ment.  Now,  whatever  may  be  said  of  the  compatibility 
or  incompatibility  of  the  critical  and  the  creative  tem 
peraments,  it  is  evident  that  in  the  matter  of  creating 
fiction  the  critical  genius  will  be  a  different  kind  of  a 
practitioner  from  the  creative  genius.  The  latter  may 
be  considered  to  produce  the  "criticism  of  life,"  but 

349 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

the  former  will  be  likely  to  produce  such  criticism  at 
one  remove — with?  in  a  word,  theory  interposed.  Even 
supposing  the  creator  to  be  also  a  critic,  if  his  creative 
imagination  preponderates,  his  theory  will  be  a  theory 
of  life,  whereas  the  theory  of  the  writer  in  whom  the 
critical  bent  preponderates  will  be  a  theory  of  art.  We 
are  said  to  suffer  nowadays  from  a  dearth  of  the  creative 
imagination.  Science,  the  great,  the  most  nearly  uni 
versal  of  the  interests  of  the  present  time,  is  perhaps 
thought  to  be  hostile  to  its  entertainment,  its  develop 
ment.  But  science,  strictly  so  called,  with  its  own 
speedy  determination  toward  specialism  is  probably 
less  fatal  to  the  imagination  than  is  generally  presumed. 
On  the  contrary,  within  its  own  range,  its  many  ranges, 
it  doubtless  stimulates  and  fosters  it.  On  the  other 
hand,  one  of  its  incidental  phases  has  undoubtedly  been 
a  wholly  cognate  intensification  of  the  spirit  of  scrutiny 
in  fields  which,  while  not  strictly  scientific,  nevertheless 
invite  inquiry  and  reward  research.  And  the  decline 
of  the  creative  imagination  in  literature,  in  poetry, 
and  in  fiction,  is,  no  doubt,  more  or  less  distinctly 
traceable  to  the  consequent  unexampled  development 
of  the  philosophic  and  critical  spirit  and  its  inevitable 
invasion  of  the  field  of  creative  activity,  the  field,  that 
is  to  say,  of  art.  The  contemporary  artist,  if  he  thinks  at 
all,  is  compelled  to  think  critically,  to  philosophize  more 
expressly  and  specifically  than  the  classic  artist  was. 
Consequently,  even  the  creative  imagination  pure  and 
simple  is  nowadays  more  rarely  to  be  encountered  than 
this  imagination  in  combination  with  critical  reflection. 

350 


HENRY  JAMES 

But  with  Mr.  James  the  case  is  far  simpler.  It  would 
be  idle  to  deny  to  the  author  of  a  shelf-full  of  novels  and 
a  thousand  or  more  characters  the  possession  of  the 
creative  imagination,  however  concentrated  upon  actu 
ality  and  inspired  by  experience.  Yet  it  is  particularly 
true  of  him  among  the  writers  of  even  our  own  time  that 
his  critical  faculty  is  eminently  preponderant — that 
he  has,  as  I  say,  essentially  the  critical  temperament. 
He  has  never  devoted  himself  very  formally  to  criticism, 
never  squared  his  elbows  and  settled  down  to  the  busi 
ness  of  it.  It  has  always  been  somewhat  incidental  and 
secondary  with  him.  His  essays  have  been  limited 
to  belles-lettres  in  range,  and  they  have  rarely  been  the 
rounded,  complete,  and  final  characterization  of  the 
subject  from  a  central  point  of  view.  Such  as,  for  ex 
ample,  Arnold's.  They  have  been  instead,  perhaps,  a 
little  agglutinate  rather  than  synthetic,  one  may  say, 
— not  very  attentively  distributed  or  organized.  But 
this  may  very  well  be  because  they  have  more  than 
eschewed  pedantry.  And  certainly  they  have  been 
felicity  itself;  each  a  series  of  penetrating  remarks,  an 
agglomeration  of  light  but  telling  touches,  immensely 
discriminating,  and  absolutely  free  from  traditional  or 
temperamental  deflection,  marked  by  a  taste  at  once 
fastidiously  academic,  and  at  the  same  time  sensitively 
impressionable.  The  two  volumes  "  French  Poets  and 
Novelists  "  and  "  Partial  Portraits  "  stand  at  the  head  of 
American  literary  criticism  and  "  Essays  in  London  and 
Elsewhere"  next  them.  The  "Life  of  Hawthorne"  is,  as  a 
piece  of  criticism,  altogether  unexcelled  and  for  the  most 

351 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

part  unrivalled  in  the  voluminous  English  Men  of  Let 
ters  series  to  which  all  the  eminent  English  critics  have 
contributed.  One  may  feel  that  his  view  of  the  general 
is,  in  this  work,  too  elevated  to  permit  him  always  cor 
rectly  to  judge  the  specific — leads  him  to  characterize, 
for  instance,  Hawthorne's  environment  as  a  handicap 
to  him,  whereas  it  was  an  opportunity.  But  to  this 
same  broad  and  academic  view,  which  measures  the  in 
dividual  by  the  standard  of  the  type  (and  how  few  there 
are  to  whom  this  standard  does  not  equitably  apply  1), 
we  owe  the  most  searching  thing  ever  said  about  Haw 
thorne:  "  Man's  conscience  was  his  theme,  but  he  saw 
it  in  the  light  of  a  creative  fancy  which  added  out  of  its 
own  substance  an  interest,  and  I  may  almost  say,  an 
importance."  The  genius  itself  of  criticism  is  in  the 
application  to  Tennyson's 

"  Tis  better  to  have  loved  and  lost 
Than  never  to  have  loved  at  all," 

of  the  epithets  "curt"  and  " reserved"  by  comparison 
with  Musset's  "  Letter  to  Lamartine."  The  essay  on 
Maupassant  is  an  unsurpassed  critical  performance. 
That  on  Emerson  is,  besides  being  subtly  critical,  of  a 
curiously  combined  elegance  and  elevation  with  a  re 
sultant  impression  of  a  piece  of  art  at  once  exquisite  and 
noble.  That  on  Fanny  Kemble  is  a  notable  piece  of  sym 
pathetic  appreciation,  and  in  places  quite  in  the  grand 
style  itself;  for  instance:  "A  prouder  nature  never 
affronted  the  long  humiliation  of  life."  In  "Daniel 
Deronda:  a  Conversation,"  there  are  more  penetrating 

352 


HENRY   JAMES 

things  said  about  George  Eliot,  one  is  tempted  to  say, 
than  in  all  else  that  has  been  written  about  her.  And  Mr. 
James's  penetration  is  uniformly  based  on  good  sense. 
It  is — perhaps  ominously — never  fanciful.  He  writes  of 
Musset  and  George  Sand,  of  Balzac  and  Trollope,  with 
a  disinterested  discrimination  absolutely  judicial.  His 
fondness  for  Daudet,  for  Turge'nieff,  for  Stevenson,  is 
nothing  in  comparison  with  his  interest  in  the  art  they 
practise,  the  art  of  which  he  is  apt  to  consider  all  its 
practitioners  somewhat  too  exclusively  merely  as  its  ex 
ponents.  If  he  has  a  passion,  it  is  for  the  art  of  fiction 
itself. 

This  is  the  theme,  indeed,  on  which  his  criticism  has 
centred,  and  the  fact  is  extremely  significant.  It  is 
almost  exact  to  say  that  he  has  no  other.  He  is  actively 
preoccupied  by  it,  even  in  the  composition  of  his  own 
fictions,  as  the  Prefaces  to  the  New  York  Edition 
copiously  attest.  That  is  what  I  mean  by  calling  his  art 
theoretic.  It  carefully,  explicitly,  with  conviction,  illus 
trates  his  theory.  He  has  an  essay  expressly  devoted 
to  the  topic,  but  he  has  many  in  which  it  is  more  or  less 
incidentally  considered,  and  the  aforesaid  Prefaces, 
taken  together,  quite  constitute  a  critical  cyclopaedia 
of  it.  In  "The  Art  of  Fiction"  he  says,  "It  is  an  in 
cident  for  a  woman  to  stand  up  with  her  hand  resting 
on  a  table  and  look  out  at  you  in  a  certain  way,"  and 
that  "  the  degree  of  interest"  such  an  incident  has  "will 
depend  upon  the  skill  of  the  painter,"  meaning  the 
author.  In  his  essay  on  Daudet  he  says:  "The  appear 
ance  of  things  is  constantly  more  complicated  as  the 

353 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

world  grows  older,  and  it  needs  a  more  and  more  pa 
tient  art,  a  closer  notation,  to  divide  it  into  its  parts;" 
"Life  is,  immensely,  a  matter  of  surface,  and  if  our 
emotions  in  general  are  interesting,  the  form  of  those 
emotions  has  the  merit  of  being  the  most  definite  thing 
about  them;"  "Putting  people  into  books  is  what  the 
novelist  lives  on ; "  "  It  is  the  real — the  transmuted  real — 
that  he  gives  us  fcest;  the  fruit  of  a  process  that  adds 
to  observation  what  a  kiss  adds  to  a  greeting.  The  joy, 
the  excitement  of  recognition,  are  keen,  even  when  the 
object  recognized  is  dismal." 

Each  of  these  sentences — and  many  more  might  be 
cited — is  a  key  to  his  own  fiction.  The  last  is  particu 
larly  indicative.  The  joy  of  recognition  is  what  ap 
parently  he  aims  at  exciting  in  his  readers;  what  cer 
tainly  he  often  succeeds  in  exciting  to  the  exclusion 
of  other  emotions,  though  the  kiss  he  adds  to  his  greet 
ing — to  adopt  his  charming  figure — is  oftenest,  perhaps, 
an  extremely  chaste  salute.  It  must  be  admitted  that 
the  pleasure  we  take  in  his  characters  largely  depends 
on  whether  or  no  we  have  encountered  them.  If  we 
have  not,  we  are  sometimes  a  little  at  sea  as  to  the 
source  of  even  his  own  interest  in  them,  which,  though 
certainly  never  profoundly  personal,  is  often  extremely 
prolonged.  If  we  have,  we  experience  the  delight  of 
the  aficionado  in  the  virtuosity  with  which  what  is  al 
ready  more  or  less  vaguely  familiar  is  unfolded  to  our 
recognition.  But  even  in  this  case  the  recognition  is 
something  quite  different  from  that  with  which  we  re 
alize  the  actualitv  of  a  largely  imaginative  character. 

354 


HENRY   JAMES 

We  recognize  Daisy  Miller,  for  example,  differently  from 
Becky  Sharp. 

For  one  thing,  we  are  not  so  anxious  to  meet  her  again. 
I  know  of  nothing  that  attests  so  plainly  the  preponder 
ance  of  virtuosity  in  Mr.  James's  art  as  the  indisposition 
of  his  readers  to  re-read  his  books.  This  would  not  be 
so  true  if  this  element  of  his  work  frankly  appeared.  If 
he  himself  accepted  it  as  such,  he  would  make  more 
of  it  in  the  traditional  way,  give  it  more  form,  express  it 
more  attentively,  harmonize  its  character  and  statement 
more  explicitly.  There  is  no  difficulty  in  re-reading 
Anatole  France.  But  Mr.  James's  virtuosity  is  not  a 
matter  of  treatment,  of  expression,  of  " process,"  as  he 
would  say.  It  is  an  integral  part  of  the  very  fabric  of  his 
conception.  It  is  engaged  and  involved  in  the  substance 
of  his  works.  The  substance  suffers  accordingly.  In 
stead  of  "a  closer  and  more  intimate  correspondence 
with  life,"  the  result  of  his  critical  theorizing  about  the 
what  and  the  how  of  fiction  is  a  confusion  of  life  and  art, 
which  are  normally  as  distinct  as  subject  and  statement. 
Virtuosity  of  technic  is  legitimate  enough,  but  virtuosity 
of  vision  is  quite  another  thing.  And  it  is  to  this  that 
Mr.  James's  study  and  practice  of  the  art  for  which  he 
has  quite  as  much  of  a  passion  as  a  penchant  have  finally 
brought  him.  "The  Sacred  Fount,"  "The  Turn  of  the 
Screw,"  are  marked  instances  of  it.  But  all  the  later 
books  show  the  tendency,  a  tendency  all  the  more 
marked  for  the  virility  and  elevation  with  which  it  is 
accompanied,  and  perhaps  inevitable  in  the  product  of 
an  overmastering  critical  faculty  exercised  in  philoso- 

355 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

phizing  about,  even  in   the  process  of  practising,  an 
eminently  constructive  art. 


IV 

When  we  predicate  elusiveness  of  Mr.  James's  fiction 
we  mean  much  more  than  that  his  meaning  is  occasion 
ally  obscure.  We  mean  that  he  himself  always  eludes 
us.  The  completeness  with  which  he  does  so,  it  is  per 
haps  possible  to  consider  the  measure  of  his  success.  The 
famous  theory  that  prescribes  disinterestedness  in  art 
may  be  invoked  in  favor  of  this  view.  Every  one  is  fa 
miliar  with  this  theory,  so  brilliantly  expounded  by  Taine, 
so  cordially  approved  by  Maupassant,  so  favorably 
viewed  by  Mr.  James  himself.  Any  one  to  whom  Aris 
totle's  dictum  that  virtue  resides  in  a  mean  seems  es 
pecially  applicable  to  art  theories,  must  find  it  difficult 
to  accept  this  prescription  even  in  theory.  Even  in 
theory  it  seems  possible  to  have  too  little  as  well  as  too 
much  of  the  artist  himself  in  any  work  of  art.  The 
presence  of  the  personality  of  the  artist,  indeed,  may  be 
called  the  constituting  element  of  a  work  of  art.  It  is 
even  the  element  that  makes  one  scientific  demonstra 
tion  what  the  scientists  themselves  call  more  "beauti 
ful  "  than  another.  But  in  practice  one  may  surely  say 
that  in  some  instances  or  on  some  occasions  we  do  not 
feel  the  artist  enough  in  his  work.  Just  as  on  others 
we  are  altogether  too  conscious  of  him. 

It  is  the  latter  difficulty  that  has  been  the  more  fre 
quent  in  fiction  up  to  the  present  age,  perhaps,  and  in 

356 


HENRY  JAMES 

English  fiction  perhaps  up  to  the  present  day.  And  very 
ikely  it  is  this  circumstance  that  has  led  to  the  generali 
zation,  and  the  present  popularity  of  the  generalization, 
which  insists  on  the  attitude  of  disinterested  curiosity 
as  the  only  properly  artistic  attitude.  Even  in  criticism, 
so  much  had  been  endured  from  the  other  attitude,  Ar 
nold — whose  practice,  to  be  sure,  was  quite  different — 
observed  that  the  great  art  was  "  to  get  oneself  out  of  the 
way  and  let  humanity  judge."  We  have  had  so  much 
partisanship  that  we  have  proscribed  personality. 

Disinterested  curiosity  is,  however,  itself  a  very  per 
sonal  matter.  Carried  to  the  extent  to  which  it  is  carried 
by  Mr.  James,  at  least,  it  becomes  very  sensible,  a  very 
appreciable  element  of  a  work  of  art.  It  is  forced  upon 
one's  notice  as  much  as  an  aggressive  and  intrusive  per 
sonal  element  could  be.  To  say  that  if  you  set  the  pieces 
of  a  work  of  art  in  a  certain  relative  position  they  will 
automatically,  as  it  were,  generate  the  effect >to  be  pro 
duced  is  to  be  tremendously  sanguine  of  their  intrinsic 
interest  and  force.  Even  then  the  artist's  presence  is  only 
minimized,  not  excluded,  one  may  logically  observe;  the 
pieces  must  be  set  together  in  a  certain  way,  and  this 
way  will  depend  on  the  idiosyncrasy  of  the  artist  and 
not  upon  the  inherent  affinity  of  the  pieces.  They  may 
have  a  law  of  combination,  but  to  prepare  them  for  its 
operation  the  law  must  be  perceived  by  the  artist  as  a 
force  to  illustrate  rather  than  merely  to  "notate,"  if  the 
result  is  to  have  an  artistic  rather  than  a  scientific  in 
terest.  As  Mr.  James  himself  has  aptly  said,  "Art  is 
merely  a  point  of  view,  and  genius  mainly  a  way  of 

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AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

looking  at  things."  And  specifically  as  to  fiction  M. 
Bourget  reports  him  as  agreeing  with  him  that  the  truest 
definition  of  a  novel  is  "a  personal  view  of  life."  How 
is  the  " point  of  view,"  above  all  the  "personal"  point 
of  view,  to  be  perceived,  if  the  artist  himself  eludes  us 
completely  ?  What  is  it  we  are  looking  at — the  phenom 
ena  he  is  recording,  or  his  view  of  the  phenomena? 
But  the  phenomena  should  of  themselves  show  his 
view,  it  may  be  contended.  If  they  do,  there  is  nothing 
to  be  said.  The  question  at  bottom  is,  do  they  ? 

The  old  practice  gave  us  the  point  of  view  by  stating 
it;  nor  could  its  statement  even  then  always  be  called 
an  artistic  intrusion,  a  false  note,  a  disillusion.  It  was 
not  always  imposed  on  the  phenomena  by  main  strength. 
When  Thackeray  was  reproached  with  marrying  Henry 
Esmond  to  Lady  Castlewood,  he  replied,  "I  didn't  do 
it;  they  did  it  themselves."  Some  such  artistic  rectitude 
as  that,  recognizing  the  law  of  his  own  creations,  is  cer 
tainly  to  be  required  of  the  artist.  But  if  his  devotion 
is  so  thoroughgoing  as  to  involve  complete  self-efface 
ment,  the  practical  result  will  be  the  disappearance,  or 
at  least  the  obscuration,  of  his  point  of  view.  That,  I 
think,  is  the  peril  which  Mr.  James's  theory  and  prac 
tice  of  art  have  not  sufficiently  recognized.  Disinter 
ested  curiosity  may  have  much  of  the  value  that  has 
been  claimed  for  it.  It  may  have  been  too  much  neg 
lected  in  the  past.  And  to  point  out  its  logical  self-con 
tradiction  as  an  absolute  prescription  may  be  conceded 
to  savor  of  hair-splitting.  It  is,  nevertheless,  only  valua 
ble  as  a  means,  as  an  agent.  When  it  is  worked  so  hard 

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HENRY   JAMES 

as  itself  to  become  a  part  of  the  effect,  its  value  ceases. 
And  in  Mr.  James's  later  work  what  we  get,  what 
we  see,  what  impresses  us,  is  not  the  point  of  view,  it 
is  his  own  disinterested  curiosity.  It  counts  as  part, 
as  a  main  part,  of  the  spectacle  he  provides  for  us.  We 
see  him  busily  getting  out  of  the  way,  visibly  withdraw 
ing  behind  the  screen  of  his  story,  illustrating  his  theory 
by  palpably  withholding  from  us  the  expected,  the 
needful,  exposition  and  explanation,  making  of  his 
work,  in  fine,  a  kind  of  elaborate  and  complicated 
fortification  between  us  and  his  personality. 

This  latter  indeed  he  may  be  said  to  have  rendered 
nearly  proof  against  all  attack  by  a  device  of  which  he 
has  latterly  made  systematic  use  and  which  may  be  de 
scribed  as  passing  the  story  to  the  reader  through  the 
mind  of  one  of  the  personages  of  it,  thus  obliterating  all 
traces  of  its  origin.  He  is  thoroughly  in  love  with  this 
idea  and  nothing  could  more  sharply  attest  his  devotion 
to  artistic  theory  than  his  advocacy  and  his  practice  of 
what  in  his  Preface  to  "The  Golden  Bowl"  he  terms 
"the  still  marked  inveteracy  of  a  certain  indirect  and 
oblique  view  of  my  presented  action."  This  oblique 
view  is  obtained,  he  continues,  by  dealing  with  his  sub 
ject-matter  "  through  the  opportunity  and  the  sensibility 
of  some  more  or  less  detached,  some  not  strictly  in 
volved,  though  thoroughly  interested  and  .intelligent, 
witness  or  reporter."  So  that  the  story  appears  "not 
as  my  own  impersonal  account  of  the  affair  in  hand,  but 
as  my  account  of  somebody's  impression  of  it — the 
terms  of  this  person's  access  to  it  and  estimate  of  it  con- 

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AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

tributing  thus  by  some  fine  little  law  to  intensification 
of  interest."  Even  as  a  matter  of  theory,  one  would  say, 
this  "fine  little  law"  could  only  operate  to  intensify  in 
terest  in  readers  who  preferred  the  " triturate"  to  the 
"  mother  tincture."  For  even  the  element  of  how  the 
action  strikes  one  of  the  participants  must  be  feebler 
than  that  of  how  it  strikes  not  only  its  own  author,  but 
the  author  of  the  participant  himself.  There  is,  to  be 
sure,  a  new  element  of  interest  added,  but  a  larger  one 
being  in  this  very  process  subtracted,  the  net  result 
is  less  interest. 

And  I  think  it  works  out  in  this  way,  too,  in  the  last 
three  novels,  which  are  certainly  wonderful  and  truly 
monumental  instances  of  extraordinary  and  original 
literary  capacity.  In  "The  Golden  Bowl"  I,  at  least, 
am  sensible  of  the  presence  of  this  artificial  ame  damn'e 
of  the  author  as  an  obstruction.  Why  should  we  not 
know  what  happened  except  as  he  or  she  could  imper 
fectly  ascertain  it,  since  what  we  wish  to  discover  is 
not  how  it  all  strikes  him  or  her,  but  how  it  strikes  us. 
In  "The  Ambassadors"  the  alembication  of  the  story 
in  the  crucible  of  the  real  hero's  mind  is  a  miracle  of 
systematic  art,  but  its  result  is  considerably  to  obscure 
and  greatly  to  enfeeble  the  story  itself  by  concentrat 
ing  the  interest  on  this  personage,  who  after  we  get  over 
thinking  of  him  as  an  obstructionist  monopolizes  our 
attention.  He  certainly  rewards  it  and  is  indubitably 
one  of  Mr.  James's  most  sympathetic  successes.  But 
this  success  is  distinctly  not  achieved  through — it  is 
distinctly  postponed  by — his  indirect  portrayal  in  illus- 

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HENRY  JAMES 

tration  of  the  artistic  theory  that  conceives  him  as 
augmenting  the  interest  of  what  he  comes  completely 
to  overshadow,  and  as  an  expedient  for  incidentally 
securing  the  inviolability  of  the  author's  own  person 
ality. 

One  notable  effect  of  this  detachment  in  the  novelist 
is  that  his  characters  do  not  seem  to  be  his  characters. 
Being  the  results  of  his  observation,  the  fruit  of  his 
experiences,  they  do  not  count  as  his  creations.  We 
meet  Mr.  James's  in  life, — or  we  do  not  meet  them, — 
as  it  happens;  but  they  do  not  figure  importantly  for 
us  in  the  world  of  art.  American  travellers  who  drift 
about  Europe — doubtless  American  residents  of  Lon 
don — encounter  their  counterparts  from  time  to  time, 
and  note  with  a  pleasure  that  is  always  more  acute  than 
permanent  how  cleverly,  how  searchingly,  Mr.  James 
has  caught  an  individual  or  fixed  a  type.  Necessarily, 
however,  a  museum  thus  collected  has  rather  an  an 
thropological  than  an  artistic  interest.  The  novelist's 
personages  are  not  sufficiently  unified  by  his  own  pen 
chant,  preference,  personality,  to  constitute  a  society 
of  varied  individuals  viewed  and  portrayed  from  one 
definite  and  particular  point  of  view — as  the  characters 
of  the  great  novelists  do.  There  is  not  enough  of  their 
creator  in  them  to  constitute  them  a  particular  society. 
The  society  is  simply  differentiated  by  the  variety  and 
circumscribed  by  the  limits  of  Mr.  James's  experience 
(and,  of  course,  its  suggestions  to  an  extremely  sensitive 
and  speculative  mind) ;  it  is  not  coordinated,  and,  as  it 
were,  organized  into  an  ideal  correlation  of  the  actual 

361 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

world  as  conceived  by  a  novelist  of  imagination, — im 
agination  not  only  such  as  Thackeray's  and  George 
Eliot's,  but  such  as  Trollope's,  even. 


It  is,  however,  not  precise  enough  to  say  that  Mr. 
James's  mind  is  essentially  critical,  and  that  therefore 
his  attitude  is  essentially  detached.  There  are  two 
sufficiently  distinct  varieties  of  the  critical  mind,  the 
philosophical  and  the  scientific.  Mr.  James's  is  the 
latter.  And  when  that  portion  of  literature  which 
includes  the  works  of  the  imagination  is  conceived  as  a 
criticism  of  life,  it  is  so  conceived  in  virtue  of  its  illus 
trating  the  former — the  philosophical  spirit.  So  far  as 
fiction  is  a  criticism  of  life,  it  is  so  because  it  exhibits  a 
philosophy  of  life,  in  general  or  in  some  particular.  It 
is  far  more  the  scientific  habit  of  viewing  life  and  its 
phenomena  that  Mr.  James  illustrates.  His  charac 
teristic  attitude  is  that  of  scrutiny.  His  inspiration  is 
curiosity.  Certainly  to  affirm  of  so  mature,  so  thought 
ful,  and  so  penetratingly  observant  a  writer,  that  he 
has  no  philosophy  of  life  would,  aside  from  its  imper 
tinence,  be  quite  unwarrantable.  It  is  impossible  not 
to  feel  in  his  fiction  that  he  has  made  his  own  synthesis 
of  "all  this  unintelligible  world."  However  impersonal 
and  objective  his  art,  it  cannot  conceal  this.  It  is 
enough  to  be  felt  to  give  weight  to  his  utterances,  to 
furnish  credentials  for  the  larger  correspondences  and 
comparisons  of  his  pictures  to  their  moral  analogies  in 

362 


HENRY  JAMES 

life,  to  add  authoritativeness  to  his  expositions,  and 
exorcise  suspicion  of  their  ephemeralness  and  super 
ficiality.  What  I  mean  is  that  even  in  such  a  work  as 
"  The  Sacred  Fount "  is  to  be  discerned  the  man  who 
has  reflected  on  the  traits  and  currents  of  existence,  on 
their  character  and  their  implications,  as  well  as  the 
writer  who  notes  the  phenomena,  without  correlating 
them  through  the  principles,  of  human  life. 

But  what  this  philosophy  is,  it  is  idle  to  speculate. 
It  is  doubtless  profound  enough,  and  though  one  does 
not  argue  introspection  of  Mr.  James's  temperament, 
— unless,  indeed,  his  work  betray  an  effort  to  escape 
it,  as  the  nuisance  it  may  easily  become, — he  could 
doubtless  sketch  it  for  us  if  inclined,  and  very  eloquently 
and  even  elaborately  draw  out  for  us  its  principles  and 
positions.  But  he  has  no  interest  whatever  in  doing 
so — no  interest  in  giving  us  even  a  hint  of  it.  One 
may  infer  that  taste  plays  a  large  part  in  it,  the 
taste  that  some  philosophers  have  made  the  foundation 
and  standard  of  morals, — the  taste,  perhaps,  that  pre 
vents  him  from  disclosing  it.  He  has  the  air  of  assum 
ing  its  universality,  as  if,  indeed,  it  were  a  matter  of 
breeding,  a  mere  preference  for  "the  best"  in  life  as  in 
art,  a  system,  in  a  wo^d,  whose  sanctions  are  instinctive, 
and  so  not  strongly  enough  or  consciously  enough  felt 
to  call  for  emphasis  or  exposition.  No  manifestation 
or  quality  or  incarnation  of  "the  best"  evokes  his 
enthusiasm.  That  it  "may  prevail"  is  the  youngest 
of  his  cares.  His  philosophy  appears  in  the  penumbra 
of  his  performance  as  a  cultivated  indifference,  or  at 

363 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

most  a  subconscious  basis  of  moral  fastidiousness  on 
which  the  superstructure  that  monopolizes  his  interest 
is  erected. 

There  are  two  sufficiently  obvious  results.  In  the 
first  place,  his  work  has  less  importance  as  literature, 
because  it  has  significance  only  as  art.  In  the  next 
place,  his  individuality  being  as  philosophically  obscure 
as  it  is  artistically  detached,  his  books  do  not  count  as 
expressional  variants  of  it,  and  are  no  more  unified 
than  their  characters  are.  If  they  were  pervaded  by, 
or  even  tinctured  with,  some  general  philosophic  char 
acter,  they  would  count  in  the  mass  for  far  more, — his 
ceuvre,  as  the  French  say,  would  have  more  relief, 
his  position  in  literature  would  be  better  defined  and 
more  important.  As  it  is,  for  the  lack  of  some  unifying 
philosophy,  each  one  is  an  independent  illustration  of 
some  particular  exercise  of  his  talent,  and  his  person 
ality  is  dissipated  by  being  thus  disseminated. 

What  is  it  to  have  a  philosophy  of  life  ?  In  any  sense 
in  which  it  may  be  legitimately  required  of  the  artist, 
even  of  the  artist  who  deals  expressly  with  life, — of 
the  poet,  the  dramatist,  or  the  writer  of  fiction, — to 
have  a  philosophy  of  life  certainly  does  not  demand 
the  possession  of  a  body  of  doctrine  "based  on  inter 
dependent,  subordinate,  and  coherent  principles,"  as 
has  been  prescribed  by  pedantry  for  criticism.  It  is 
simply  to  be  profoundly  impressed  by  certain  truths. 
These  truths  need  not  be  recondite,  but  they  must  be 
deeply  felt.  They  need  be  in  no  degree  original.  The 
writer's  originality  will  have  abundant  scope  in  their 

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HENRY   JAMES 

expression.  Goethe,  it  is  true,  replied  to  a  perhaps  not 
wholly  pedantic  criticism  of  "Wilhelm  Meister":  "I 
should  think  a  rich,  manifold  life  brought  close  to  our 
eyes  would  be  enough  in  itself  without  any  express 
tendency."  And  Goethe  is  probably  the  greatest  ex 
ample  of  the  artist  and  the  philosopher  combined.  This 
observation,  however,  is  confined  to  a  single  work;  it  is 
impossible  to  think  of  the  author  of  "  Wilhelm  Meister  " 
as  the  author  only  of  it  and  of  works  of  like  aim  and 
scope.  And  furthermore,  the  life  which  Mr.  James's 
books  bring  close  to  our  eyes,  though  manifold,  is  not 
rich.  It  is  remarkably  multifarious,  but  "rich"  is 
precisely  the  last  epithet  that  could  properly  be  applied 
to  it. 

It  is,  nevertheless,  the  result  of  observation  of  the 
most  highly  developed  material,  and  if  it  lack  vitality, 
it  is  not  because  it  is  commonplace  or  rudimentary. 
The  converse  is  so  pointedly  the  case  as  to  constitute 
Mr.  James's  chief  excellence.  It  has  been  said  of  him 
that  he  has  not  sounded  the  depths,  but  "  charted  the 
shallows"  of  life.  But  to  say  this  is  quite  to  miss  the 
point  about  him.  Occupy  himself  with  the  shallows 
he  certainly  often  does,  though  quite  without  any 
attempt  to  chart  them,  any  attempt  at  completeness. 
It  is  evident  that  he  is  not  concerned  to  show  them 
as  shallows,  with  the  inference  that  they  compose  a 
far  larger  part  of  life  than  is  apprehended  by  cur 
rent  mechanical  optimism.  He  does  not  deal  with 
them  in  any  such  philosophical  spirit.  His  scientific 
curiosity  does  not  distinguish  between  the  phenomena, 

365 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

all  of  which  are  inexhaustibly  interesting  to  him. 
Except  certain  coarsenesses,  which  probably  seem  to 
him  almost  pathologic,  or  at  any  rate  too  ordinary 
and  commonplace  for  treatment,  nothing  is  to  him, 
as  I  have  said,  too  insignificant  to  be  interesting, 
considered  as  material  for  artistic  treatment.  The 
treatment  is  to  dignify  the  theme  always.  And  in  this 
attitude  no  one  can  fail  to  see,  if  not  a  deeper  interest 
in  art  than  in  life,  at  least  an  interest  in  life  so  impar 
tial  and  inclusive  as  to  approach  aridity  so  far  as  feeling 
is  concerned.  To  take  an  interest  in  making  interesting 
what  is  in  itself  perfectly  colorless  is,  one  must  admit, 
almost  to  avow  a  fondness  for  the  tour  de  force  dear  to 
the  dilettante.  Still  it  would  be  misleading  to  insist 
on  this,  because  Mr.  James's  intention  is,  on  the  whole, 
to  indicate  the  significance  of  the  apparently  trifling, 
and  not  to  protest  that  an  artistic  effect  can  be  got  out  of 
next  to  nothing.  It  betrays  the  interest  of  the  naturalist 
asseverating  that  nothing  is  really  trifling,  since  it  exists. 
It  is  easy  to  lose  one's  way  in  endeavoring  to  follow 
the  clue  of  Mr.  James's  preoccupation,  but  with  due 
attention  I  think  it  may  be  done.  And  his  interest  in 
making  interesting  the  pose  and  gesture  of  a  lady 
standing  by  a  table,  let  me  recapitulate,  is  not,  or  is  only 
a  little,  to  produce  an  artistic  effect  with  a  minimum 
of  means;  nor  is  it  to  show  that  of  such  trifles  human 
life  is  largely  composed;  it  is  to  show  that  in  life  itself 
such  things  are  interesting  not  only  because  everything 
is,  but  also  because,  though  slight,  they  are  subtle  and 
certain  indications  of  the  character  to  which  they  belong. 

366 


HENRY  JAMES 

In  this  way  he  can  find  something  recondite  in  what 
is  superficially  very  simple.  And  I  should  say  that  it  is, 
in  a  word,  to  the  pursuit  of  the  recondite  in  life  that  he 
has  come  more  and  more  to  consecrate  his  extraordi 
nary  powers.  He  sees  it  in  everything,  in  the  simple 
as  well  as  in  the  complicated,  in  the  shallows  as  well  as 
in  the  depths.  That  is  all  one  can  truthfully  say,  per 
haps,  though  of  course  in  seeking  it  in  the  familiar  and 
the  commonplace  it  is  difficult  to  avoid  the  semblance 
of  mystification. 

The  pursuit  of  the  recondite,  however,  is  quite  in 
consistent  with  much  dwelling  on  the  meaning  of  life 
as  a  whole.  And  it  is  owing  to  his  taking  this  latter  so 
much  for  granted  as  so  largely  to  exclude  it  from  his 
fiction,  that  the  life  which  Mr.  James  "brings  close"  to 
us  should  lack  the  " richness"  that  Goethe  claimed  for 
"  Wilhelm  Meister."  If  he  conceived  the  shallows  as 
shallows  and  the  depths  as  depths,  he  could  hardly 
avoid  taking  a  less  arid  view  of  them,  and  the  astonish 
ing  variety  of  the  phenomena  that  entertain  and  even 
absorb  him  would  be  grouped  in  some  synthetic  way 
around  centres  of  coordinating  feeling,  instead  of 
unrolled  like  a  panorama  of  trifles  hitherto  unconsid- 
ered  and  tragedies  hitherto  unsuspected— exhibited 
like  a  naturalist's  collection  made  in  a  country  accessible 
to  all,  but  heretofore  un visited  by  the  scientist  with  the 
seeing  eye. 

Hence,  I  think,  the  lack  of  large  vitality  in  his  books, 
of  a  sensibly  noble  and  moving  effect.  The  search  for 
the  recondite  involves  the  absence  of  direct  dealing  with 

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AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

the  elemental.  The  passions  are  perforce  minimized, 
from  being  treated  in  their  differentiation  rathor  than 
in  their  universality,  as  well  as  from  being  so  swamped 
in  minutiae  as  largely  to  lose  their  energy.  His  books 
are  not  moral  theses,  but  psychological  themes,  studies 
not  of  forces,  but  of  manifestations.  The  latter  are  re 
lated  as  cause  and  effect,  perhaps,  but  not  combined 
in  far-reaching  suggestiveness.  The  theme  has  weight 
at  times,  morally  considered,  but  it  is  not  rendered  typi 
cal,  as  in  George  Eliot,  for  example.  It  is  never  either 
ominous  or  reassuring.  It  is  never  brought  close,  in 
Goethe's  words,  to  the  reader.  It  makes  him  reflect, 
but  speculatively;  reason,  but  academically.  It  is  an 
unfolding,  a  laying  bare,  but  not  a  putting  together. 
The  imagination  to  which  it  is  due  is  too  tinctured  with 
curiosity  to  be  truly  constructive.  It  has  the  disadvan 
tage  of  never  taking  possession  of  the  theme  and  con 
ducting  it  masterfully.  It  is  not  a  priori  enough.  It 
is  held  in  the  leash  of  observation  and  fettered  by  its 
voluntary  submission  to  the  material,  to  exhibit  rather 
than  to  arrange  which  is  its  specific  ambition.  The 
work  as  a  whole  is  thus  necessarily  coldly  conceived. 
The  heat  is  in  the  narration  of  detail.  And  thus  the 
reader  is  impressed  far  more  by  the  detail  than  by 
either  the  grand  construction  or  by  the  general  design. 
Above  all,  the  characters,  the  portraiture  of  human  na 
ture,  upon  which  the  vitality  of  fiction  depends,  suffer 
from  the  recondite  quality,  which  wars  with  the  ele 
mental  and  thus  tends  to  eliminate  the  typical,  the  rep 
resentative,  which  constitutes  the  basis  of  both  effec- 

368 


HENRY   JAMES 

tive  illusion  and  significant  truth.  But  of  course  all  that 
makes  types  interesting  is  the  possession  of  a  philosophy 
of  life.  They  imply  classification,  which  is  the  last 
thing  to  be  looked  for  in  the  espieglerie  of  the  most  pre 
cocious  conceivable  chiel  among  us  merely  occupied  in 
taking  notes. 

VI 

After  all,  the  supreme  test  of  a  novelist's  abiding 
interest  is  the  humanity  of  his  characters.  This  is  cer 
tainly  true  of  the  drama.  The  play  is  not  the  thing 
without  Hamlet.  But  as  to  the  novel  Mr.  James  would 
doubtless  insist  that  the  characters  be  enveloped  and 
exhibited  in  an  illusion  of  life  as  a  distinct  though  not 
of  course  independent  factor  of  the  picture — a  palpa 
ble  general  medium  in  which  the  figures  exist  and 
move.  This,  indeed,  I  take  it,  is  his  view  of  the  peculiar 
province,  the  distinctive  advantage,  of  the  novel  over 
other  varieties  of  literary  representation.  The  difficulty 
with  this  is  not  in  the  idea,  but  in  its  execution.  Exe 
cuted  in  conscious  illustration  of  its  importance  the 
medium  is  apt  to  minimize  the  figures.  We  exchange 
"The  School  of  Athens"  for  "The  Departure  for  Cy- 
thera,"  Titian's  "Entombment"  for  an  interior  by  De 
Hooghe.  On  the  other  hand,  if  the  figures  are  fine  the 
scene  is  extremely  likely  to  take  care  of  itself.  Mr. 
James,  for  instance,  professes  a  preference  for  "The 
House  of  the  Seven  Gables"  over  the  other  romances 
of  Hawthorne  because  it  seems  to  him  more  of  a  novel, 
because  he  hears  more  of  the  "vague  hum"  of  life  in  it 

369 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

than  in  the  other  novels, — and  to  find  or  search  for  the 
hum  of  life  in  Hawthorne  is  to  have  a  sharp  sense  for  it. 
"The  House  of  the  Seven  Gables"  is,  however,  if  not  the 
least  characteristic  of  Hawthorne's  larger  productions,  at 
least  that  in  which  the  characters  have  the  slenderest  in 
terest,  the  most  shadowy  outlines.  They  do  not  compare 
with  those  of  "The  Scarlet  Letter."  Mr.  James  also 
notes  the  general  absence  of  types  in  Hawthorne's  books, 
and  they  certainly  fail  in  effectiveness  for  this  reason  as 
well  as  for  containing  so  little  of  the  hum  of  life.  The 
same  might  be  said  of  the  personages  of  later  and  far  less 
romantic  writers.  The  type  in  fiction  has  become  a  little 
old-fashioned — at  least  the  labelled  and  easily  recog 
nized  type  has.  It  is  relegated  to  the  stage,  where,  ap 
parently,  it  will  continue,  from  the  limitations  of  the 
histrionic  art,  to  be  a  necessity.  In  the  novel  it  has  large 
ly  succumbed  to  the  conquering  force  of  psychology, 
which  in  creating  an  individual  and  to  that  end  em 
phasizing  his  idiosyncrasies  has,  almost  proportionally, 
robbed  him  of  his  typical  interest.  And  this  is  a  loss 
for  which  absolutely  nothing  can  atone  in  the  work  of 
the  realistic  novelist  whose  theme  is  actual  life.  It  is  im 
possible  to  be  deeply  interested  in  something  too  idiosyn 
cratic  for  identification. 

The  list  of  Mr.  James's  novels  is  a  long  one,  and  his 
short  stories  are  very  numerous;  and  among  them  all 
there  is  not  one  with  a  perfunctory  or  desultory  in 
spiration.  Why  is  it  that  they  in  no  sense  constitute  a 
com'edie  humainef  They  are  very  populous;  why  is  it 
that  the  characters  that  people  them  have  so  little  re- 

370 


HENRY  JAMES 

lief?  Taken  together  they  constitute  the  least  success 
ful  element  of  his  fiction.  Partly  this  is  because,  as  I 
say,  they  possess  so  little  typical  quality.  But  why  also 
do  they  possess  so  little  personal  interest  ?  They  have, 
seemingly,  astonishingly  little,  even  for  their  creator. 
So  far  from  knowing  the  sound  of  their  voices,  as 
Thackeray  said  of  his,  he  is  apparently  less  preoccupied 
with  them  than  about  the  situation— the  "predica 
ment,"  he  would  aptly  say — in  which  he  places  them. 
Apparently  he  is  chiefly  concerned  with  what  they  are 
to  do  when  confronted  with  the  complications  his  in 
genuity  devises  for  them, — how  they  are  to  "pull  it  off." 
These  complications  are  sometimes  very  slight,  in  order 
to  show,  or  at  least  showing,  what  trifles  control  desti 
nies;  sometimes  they  are  very  grave,  and  exhibit  the 
conflict  of  the  soul  with  warring  desires  and  distracting 
perplexities.  And  they  are  never  commonplace— any 
more  than  the  characters  themselves,  each  one  of  which 
is  intimately  observed  and  thoroughly  respected  as  an 
individuality.  But  their  situation  rather  than  them 
selves  is  what  constitutes  the  claim,  the  raison  d'etre,  of 
the  book  in  which  they  figure.  The  interest  in  the  book, 
accordingly,  becomes  analogous  to  that  of  a  game  in 
which  the  outcome  rather  than  the  pieces  monopolizes 
the  attention.  It  cannot  be  said  that  the  pieces  are  not 
attentively  described,— some  of  them,  indeed,  are  very 
artistically  and  even  beautifully  carved, — but  it  is  the 
moves  that  count  most  of  all.  Will  Densher  give  a 
plausible  solution  to  the  recondite  problem  of  how  to 
combine  the  qualities  of  a  cad  and  of  a  gentleman  ? 

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AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

Will  Maisie  decide  for  or  against  Sir  Claude?  What 
decision  will  Sir  Claude  himself  make?  Has  Vander- 
bank  ideality  enough  to  marry  Nanda?  Will  Chad 
Newsome  go  back  to  Woollett  ?  The  game  is  very  well, 
often  exquisitely,  played;  and  the  result,  which,  never 
theless,  from  all  we  know  of  the  characters,  we  can 
rarely  foresee,  wears — when  we  argue  it  out  in  ret 
rospect  as  the  author  clearly  has  done  in  advance — the 
proper  artistic  aspect  of  a  foregone  conclusion.  Mr. 
James  rarely  seems  to  impose  it  himself;  except  on  the 
few  occasions  when,  as  in  "The  Princess  Casamas- 
sima"  or  "The  Other  House,"  he  deals  in  melodrama, 
in  which  he  almost  never  suceeds  in  being  convincing, 
his  rectitude  is  so  strong  a  reliance  as  to  exclude  all 
impression  of  perversity  or  wilfulness  and  convey  the 
agreeable  sense  of  sufficiently  fatalistic  predestination. 
Meantime  you  find  out  about  the  characters  from  the 
result.  Since  it  has  turned  out  in  this  way,  they  must 
have  been  such  and  such  persons.  In  other  words,  they 
have  not  been  characterized  very  vividly,  have  not  been 
presented  very  completely  as  human  beings. 

At  least  they  do  not  people  one's  memory,  I  think, 
as  the  personages  of  many  inferior  artists  do.  When 
one  thinks  of  the  number  of  characters  that  Mr.  James 
has  created,  each,  as  I  have  said,  carefully  individual 
ized,  and  none  of  them  replicas, — an  amazing  world 
they  certainly  compose  in  their  originality  and  variety,— 
it  is  odd  what  an  effort  it  is  to  recall  even  their  names. 
The  immortal  Daisy  Miller,  the  sensitive  and  highly 
organized  Ralph  Touchett,  the  robust  and  thoroughly 

372 


HENRY  JAMES 

national  Christopher  Newman,  the  gentle  Miss  Pynsent, 
and  a  number  of  others  that  do  remain  in  one's  mem 
ory,  mainly  belong  to  the  earlier  novels  and  form  but 
a  small  proportion  of  the  great  number  of  their  author's 
creations.  Different  readers,  however,  would  no  doubt 
answer  this  rather  crude  test  differently,  and  in  any 
case  it  is  not  because  they  fail  in  precision  that  Mr. 
James's  personages  lose  distinctness  as  their  story,  like 
all  stories,  fades  from  the  recollection.  They  have  a 
sharp  enough  outline,  but  they  are  not  completely 
enough  characterized. 

Why  ?  Why  is  it  that  when  the  American  heroine  of 
one  of  his  stories,  beautifully  elaborated  in  detail,  a  per 
fect  specimen  of  Dutch  intarsla,  kills  herself  because 
her  English  husband  publishes  a  savage  book  about 
her  country,  we  find  ourselves  perfectly  unprepared  for 
this  denouement?  Why  is  it  that  with  all  the  pains  ex 
pended  on  the  portrait  of  the  extraordinary  Mrs.  Head 
way  of  "The  Siege  of  London,"  we  never  quite  get  his 
point  of  view,  but  are  kept  considering  the  social  duty 
of  the  prig  who  passes  his  valuable  time  in  observing  her 
attempts  at  rehabilitation  and — no  doubt  most  justly — 
exposes  her  in  the  end  ?  There  is  nothing  to  complain 
of  in  the  result,  the  problem  is  worked  out  satisfactorily 
enough,  but  Mrs.  Headway  herself  does  not  count  for 
us,  does  not  hang  together,  in  the  way  in  which  Augier's 
Aventuriere  does,  or  even  Dumas's  Baronne  d'Ange. 
It  would  be  difficult,  for  example,  for  this  reason,  to 
make  a  play  of  "The  Siege  of  London." 

The  answer  to  this  query,  the  explanation  of  this  in- 
373 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

completeness  of  characterization  in  Mr.  James's  never 
theless  very  precise  personages,  consists,  I  think,  in  the 
fact  that  he  rather  pointedly  neglects  the  province  of 
the  heart.  This  has  been  from  the  first  the  natural  peril 
of  the  psychological  novelist,  the  neglect  of  what  in 
the  Scripture  view  constitutes  "the  whole  man,"  just 
as  the  neglect  of  the  mind — which  discriminates  and  de 
fines  personalities  once  constituted — was  the  defect  of 
the  psychological  novelist's  predecessor.  But  for  Mr. 
James  this  peril  has  manifestly  no  terrors.  The  prov 
ince  of  the  heart  seems  to  him,  perhaps,  so  much  to  be 
taken  for  granted  as  to  be  on  the  whole  rather  negligi 
ble,  so  far  as  romantic  exploitation  is  concerned. 

Incidentally,  one  may  ask,  if  all  the  finest  things  in 
the  world  are  to  be  assumed,  what  is  there  left  for  ex 
ploitation  ?  Matter  for  curiosity  mainly — the  curiosity 
which  in  Mr.  James  is  so  sharp  and  so  fruitful.  The 
realm  of  the  affections  is  that  which — ex  vi  termini,  one 
may  say — most  engages  and  attaches.  Are  we  to  be 
interested  in  fiction  without  liking  it?  And  are  we  to 
savor  art  without  experiencing  emotion  ?  The  fact  that 
few  reread  Mr.  James  means  that  his  form,  however 
adequate  and  effective,  is  not  in  itself  agreeable.  But 
it  means  still  more  that  his  "content"  is  not  attaching. 
When  Lockhart  once  made  some  remark  to  Scott  about 
poets  and  novelists  looking  at  life  as  mere  material  for 
art,  the  "veteran  Chief  of  Letters"  observed:  "I  fear 
you  have  some  very  young  ideas  in  your  head.  We  shall 
never  learn  to  feel  and  respect  our  real  calling,  unless  we 
have  taught  ourselves  to  consider  everything  as  moon- 

374 


HENRY   JAMES 

shine  compared  with  the  education  of  the  heart."  Is 
it  possible  that  Mr.  James's  controlling  idea  is  a  " young 
one"?  Is  his  undoubted  originality,  after  all,  the  ex 
ploitation  of  what  seemed  to  so  wise  a  practitioner  as 
Scott,  "moonshine"?  That  would  account,  perhaps, 
for  the  pallid  light  that  often  fills  his  canvas  when  his 
characters  are  grouped  in  a  scene  where  "the  human 
heart" — insight  into  which  used  to  be  deemed  the 
standard  of  the  novelist's  excellence — has  a  part  of  any 
prominence  to  play.  The  voluntary  abandonment  by 
the  novelist  of  such  a  field  of  interest  as  the  province 
of  the  heart  is  witness,  at  all  events,  of  an  asceticism 
whose  compensations  ought  in  prudence  to  be  thor 
oughly  assured.  Implied,  understood — this  domain! 
Very  well,  one  may  reply,  but  what  a  field  of  universal 
interest  you  neglect,  what  a  rigorously  puritanic  sacri 
fice  you  make! 

Thus  to  neglect  the  general  field  which  the  historic 
poets  and  romancers  have  so  fruitfully  cultivated  re 
sults,  however,  in  only  a  negative  disadvantage,  it  may 
be  contended,  and  Mr.  James's  psychology  may  be 
thought  by  many  readers  a  fair  compensation.  It  is  cer 
tainly  prodigiously  well  done.  A  writer  with  nothing 
more  and  nothing  better  to  his  credit  than  the  group 
of  stories  assembled  under  the  title  "The  Better  Sort" 
has  an  indisputable  claim  to  be  considered  a  master, 
whatever  one  may  think  of  the  tenuity  of  his  themes 
and  the  disproportionate  attentiveness  of  their  treat 
ment.  "It  is  proprement  dit,  but  it  is  pale,"  he  makes 
a  suppositions  Frenchman  say  of  his  romance,  in  his 

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AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

clever  and  suggestive  "The  Point  of  View";  and  he 
frankly  records  his  failure  to  interest  Turge*nieff  in  the 
fictions  he  used  to  send  him  from  time  to  time.  All  the 
same,  a  new  genre  is  a  new  genre,  and  as  such  it  is  idle 
to  belittle  Mr.  James's,  as  readers  too  dull  to  seize  its 
qualities  sometimes  impertinently  and  impatiently  do. 
But  specifically  and  positively  a  novelist's  neglect  of 
the  province  of  the  heart  involves  the  disadvantage  of 
necessarily  incomplete  portraiture. 

A  picture  of  human  life  without  reference  to  the 
passions,  the  depiction  of  human  character  minus  this 
preponderating  constituent  element  of  it,  cannot  but  be 
limited  and  defective.  The  view  that  half-consciously 
regards  the  passions  as  either  titanic  or  vulgar,  and 
therefore  only  pertinent  as  artistic  material  to  either 
tragedy  or  journalism,  is  a  curiously  superficial  one. 
The  most  controlled  and  systematized  life,  provided  it 
illustrate  any  ideality,  is  inspired  by  them  as  fully  as  the 
least  directed  and  most  irregular.  The  diminution  of 
demonstrativeness  under  the  influence  of  civilization  is 
no  measure  of  the  diminution  of  feeling;  and  even 
if  we  feel  less  than  our  forefathers,  our  feeling  is  still 
the  dominant  element  in  us.  Every  one's  consciousness 
attests  this,  that  of  the  ascetic  as  well  as  that  of  the  epi 
curean,  that  of  the  patrician  and  the  Brahmin  as  well  as 
that  of  the  peasant  and  the  clown.  Whether  the  drama 
of  human  life  is  of  the  soul  or  of  the  senses,  it  is  equally 
real,  universal,  and  the  resultant  of  the  passions.  To 
assume  that  the  modern  man,  whatever  the  degree  of  his 
complicated  differentiation,  is  any  more  destitute  of 

376 


HENRY  JAMES 

them  than  his  autochthonous  ancestor,  is  to  leave  out  of 
consideration  the  controlling  constituent  of  his  nature 
and  the  mainspring  of  his  action.  All  of  these  per 
sonages  that  people  Mr.  James's  extraordinarily  varied 
world  must  have  them,  and  the  circumstance  that  he 
rarely,  if  ever,  tells  us  what  they  are,  makes  us  feel 
our  acquaintance  with  his  personages  to  be  partial 
and  superficial.  At  times  we  can  infer  them,  it  is  true. 
But  every  art,  certainly  not  excepting  the  novelist's, 
needs  all  the  aid  it  can  get  to  make  itself  effective,  and 
reliance  on  inference  instead  of  statement  results  here 
in  a  very  shadowy  kind  of  substance. 

Is  it  because  of  a  certain  coolness  in  Mr.  James's 
own  temperament  that  his  report  of  human  nature  is 
thus  incomplete?  Does  he  make  us  weep — or  laugh — 
so  little  because  he  is  so  unmoved  himself,  because  he 
illustrates  so  imperturbably  and  fastidiously  the  con 
verse  of  the  Horatian  maxim?  Candidly  speaking, 
perhaps  we  have  no  business  to  inquire.  Whether  it  is 
due  to  his  theory  or  to  the  temperament  responsible 
for  his  theory,  perhaps  it  is  both  pertinent  and  proper 
to  rest  in  the  indisputable  fact  that  he  does  leave  us 
unmoved.  After  all,  the  main  question  is,  does  the  fact 
have  for  us  the  compensations  that  evidently  it  has 
for  him  ?  Say  that  he  deals  so  little  with  the  emotions 
because  preoccupation  with  them  deflects  and  distracts 
from  the  business  of  presenting  in  all  its  force  of  singu- 
larization  and  relief,  at  whatever  cost  of  completeness, 
the  truths  and  traits  of  human  nature  that  most  in 
terest  him,  that  interest  him  so  intensely.  Say  even, 

377 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

in  other  words,  that  to  feel  an  emotional  interest  in  his 
personages  is  for  an  author  to  incur  the  risk  of  a  partial 
ity  inconsistent  with  artistic  rectitude.  Certainly  it  is 
impossible  to  be  blind  to  this  controlling  rectitude  in 
Mr.  James,  impossible  to  avoid  recognizing — however 
easy  we  may  suspect  nature  has  made  it  for  him — his 
unalterable  fidelity  to  his  main  purpose  in  his  fictions, 
which  is  to  clothe  and  depict  the  idea  he  wishes  to  illus 
trate,  whatever  becomes  of  his  people  in  the  process. 
Say,  too,  that — though  sometimes,  in  consequence,  these 
remain  very  much  on  the  hither  side  of  realization,  and 
though  they  never  take  possession  of  the  scene  them 
selves  and  tell  or  enact  their  own  story,  without,  at  any 
rate,  our  feeling  that  they  rely  largely  on  the  subtlest  of 
prompters — they  nevertheless  always  strictly  subserve 
the  larger  design  of  their  creator.  Grant  all  this.  The 
salient  fact  remains  that  their  creator  is  too  much  con 
cerned  with  the  laws  of  his  universe,  apparently,  to  as 
sign  them  other  than  vicarious  functions,  or  to  take 
other  than  what  is  called  an  "intellectual"  interest  in 
them. 

And  this  is  an  interest  extremely  difficult  for  an  au 
thor  to  make  his  readers  share.  The  reader  is  much 
more  readily  interested  through  his  sympathies,  and 
cannot  be  relied  upon  to  attach  to  phenomena  which 
exclude  these  the  same  importance  as  the  writer  who  is 
exploiting  them.  He  will  readily  respond  to  the  au 
thor  who  illustrates  "What  a  piece  of  work  is  man  I" 
and  at  the  same  time  imperfectly  echo  the  enthusiasm  of 
the  artist  who  exclaims,  "How  beautiful  a  thing  is  this 

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HENRY   JAMES 

perspective!"  Mr.  James's  enthusiasm,  one  may  fanci 
fully  say,  is  for  the  perspective  rather  than  for  the  sub 
stance  of  human  nature,  and  even  this,  of  course,  in  tak 
ing  it  from  him,  we  are  obliged  to  enjoy  at  one  remove; 
so  that,  even  supposing  our  pure  curiosity  to  equal  his, 
we  can  hardly  be  counted  on  to  feel  the  same  amount 
for  his  report  of  life  as  he  feels  for  life  itself.  We  need 
something  of  him  to  compensate  for  the  inevitable  loss 
of  heat  involved  in  the  process  of  translation.  And  this 
he  is  extremely  chary  of  giving  us.  What  chiefly  we 
perceive  is  his  own  curiosity. 

Of  this,  indeed,  we  get,  I  think,  a  surfeit.  Without 
more  warmth  than  he  either  feels  or  will  suffer  himself 
to  exhibit,  it  is  difficult  for  him  to  communicate  the  zest 
he  plainly  takes  in  the  particular  material  he  in  general 
exploits.  It  is  too  special,  too  occasional,  too  recondite, 
at  times  certainly  too  trivial,  to  stand  on  its  own  merits, 
aided  merely  by  extraordinary  but  wholly  unemotional 
cleverness  of  presentation.  In  fact,  I  think  one  may 
excusably  go  so  far  as  to  confess  a  certain  antipathy 
to  the  degree  in  which  the  author  exhibits  this  curiosity. 
Scrutiny  so  searching  quite  excludes  sympathy.  "  In  the 
Cage/'  for  instance,  is  a  wonderful  study,  but  so  persist 
ent  and  penetrating  as  to  appear  positively  pitiless. 
How  many  years  ago  was  it  that  Arnold  complained 
that  curiosity,  which  had  a  good  sense  in  French,  had 
a  bad  one  in  English  ?  For  Mr.  James  it  is  not  only 
not  a  defect,  and  not  merely  a  quality,  but  a  cardinal 
virtue.  Balzac  was  certainly  not  a  sentimentalist,  yet 
Taine  ascribes  what  he  considers  the  superiority  of 

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AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

Valerie  Marneffe  to  Rebecca  Sharp  to  the  fact  that 
Balzac  "aime  sa  Valerie."  Would  it  ever  occur  to 
any  one  to  suspect  that  Mr.  James  " loved"  any  of  his 
characters?  Ralph  Touchett,  perhaps;  perhaps  also 
Mr.  Lewis  Lambert  Strether;  yes,  and  Miss  Pyn- 
sent;  but  surely  the  extraordinary  attention  that  almost 
all  his  later  personages  receive  from  him  is  not  an 
affectionate  interest,  and,  as  I  say,  I  think  the  result 
is  less  completeness  of  presentment,  less  vigor  of  por 
traiture. 

It  is  not  unlikely  that  his  frequent  practice  of  identi 
fying  himself  with  one  of  his  characters  by  making  him 
narrate  the  tale  is  in  part  responsible  for  this  impression 
of  extreme  coolness  in  the  narrator  that  we  get  from 
the  book  and  unconsciously  refer  to  the  author.  There 
are  a  number  of  his  stories  in  which  the  fictitious  narra 
tor  exhibits  his  frigid  curiosity  with  a  single-minded- 
ness  that  awakens  discomfort  as  positive  as  that  Mr. 
James  himself  complains  of  in  reading  the  closing 
scenes  of  "The  Newcomes."  One  winces  at  the  scrutiny 
of  defenceless  personages  practised  by  the  narrators  of 
"The  Pension  Beaurepas,"— a  delightful  sketch;  of 
"Four  Meetings," — a  masterpiece  of  satire  and  of 
pathos;  of  a  dozen  other  tales  in  which  some  en 
thusiastic  naturalist  studies  his  spitted  specimens. 
The  most  conspicuous  instance  of  this  is  undoubtedly 
"The  Sacred  Fount,"  which  for  this  reason  is  an 
unpleasant  as  well  as  a  mystifying  book.  The  amount 
of  prying,  eavesdropping,  "snooping,"  in  that  ex 
asperating  performance  is  prodigious,  and  the  uncon- 

380 


HENRY  JAMES 

sciousness  of  indiscretion  combined  with  its  excess 
gives  one  a  very  uncomfortable  feeling, — a  feeling,  too, 
whose  discomfort  is  aggravated  by  the  insipidity  of  the 
fanciful  phenomena  which  evoke  in  the  narrator  such 
a  disproportionate  interest.  Perhaps  this  nosing  curios 
ity  is  itself  a  trait  of  the  "week-end"  in  England,  and 
designed  to  be  pilloried  as  such.  No  one  can  know. 
But  in  this  case  one  may  wish  the  point  had  been  made 
plainer,  even  in  a  book  where  it  is  apparently  the  au 
thor's  intention  to  make  everything  obscure. 

There  are,  moreover,  many  stories  by  Mr.  James  in 
which  this  pathologic  curiosity  is  manifested,  not  by  the 
narrator, — for  whom  there  is  a  technical  excuse, — but 
by  one  or  more  of  the  characters.  "The  Siege  of  Lon 
don"  is  an  example.  From  this  story  one  might  infer 
that  the  close  observation  of  a  squirming  and  suffer 
ing  though  doubtless  highly  reprehensible  woman  could 
really  occupy  the  leisure  of  a  scrupulous  gentleman. 
Is  it  true  that  curiosity  is  a  "  passion  "  of  our  attenuated 
modern  life, — curiosity  of  this  kind,  I  mean;  the  curi 
osity  that  feeds  on  the  conduct  and  motives  of  one's 
fellows  in  whom  one  feels  no  other  interest  ?  It  is  at  all 
events  true  that  it  is  the  one  "passion"  celebrated  with 
any  ample  cordiality  by  Mr.  James,  though,  as  I  say,  to 
inquire  if  he  shares  it  be  to  inquire  "too  curiously." 
He  himself — whom  nothing  escapes  that  he  does  not 
exclude,  one  is  sometimes  tempted  to  think — has  noted 
the  characteristic.  I  wish  I  could  put  my  hand  on  the 
passage — I  am  confident  it  is  in  one  of  his  earlier  works 
— in  which  he  speaks  of  a  certain  indiscreet  closeness 

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AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

of  observation  as  a  disagreeable  trait  of  a  certain  order 
of  Frenchman.  Literature  of  course  has  quite  other 
sanctions  than  those  of  life,  but  surely  no  writer  of  dis 
tinction,  French  or  other,  has  ever  shown  this  trait 
in  such  opulent  profusion  as  it  is  exhibited  in  Mr. 
James's  fiction,  where  the  famous  watchword,  "dis 
interested  curiosity,"  is  carried  so  far  as  to  count  as  an 
element  of  the  fiction  itself,  and  not  merely  as  a  guaran 
tee  of  the  author's  impartiality.  It  is  "disinterested" 
enough  in  the  sense  hitherto  intended  by  the  epithet, 
but  in  its  own  exercise  it  is  made  to  appear  ferociously 
egoistic.  The  author  is  not  merely  detached;  his  de 
tachment  is  enthusiastic.  One  may  say  he  is  ardently 
frigid.  The  result  in  these  instances,  I  think,  is  the 
detachment  of  his  readers;  certainly  the  elimination 
from  the  field  of  interest  of  those  characters  and  that 
part  of  every  character  which,  too  fundamental  and 
general  to  reward  mere  curiosity,  however  disinterest 
edly  avid,  nevertheless  constitute  the  most  real,  the 
most  attaching,  and  the  most  substantial  elements  of 
human  life. 

VII 

It  is  possibly  owing  in  some  degree  to  his  dispassion 
ateness  that  Mr.  James  passes  popularly  for  preemi 
nently  the  novelist  of  culture.  A  writer  so  refined  and 
so  detached  is  inferen dally  the  product  of  letters  as  well 
as  of  life.  Less  than  with  any  other  would  it  seem  con 
gruous  to  associate  with  him  the  notion  of  crudity  in 
any  of  its  aspects  or  degrees,  the  notion  of  nonconform- 

382 


HENRY   JAMES 

ity  to  the  canon,  recalcitrancy  to  the  received.  And 
certainly  he  has  neglected  nothing  of  the  best  that  has 
been  thought  and  said  in  the  world  so  far  as  his  own  art 
is  concerned.  He  does  not  look  at  life  through  books; 
far  from  it.  But  with  the  books  that  illustrate  the  prob 
lem  of  how  art  should  look  at  life  he  is  thoroughly 
familiar.  On  the  art  and  in  the  province  of  latter-day 
fiction,  at  any  rate,  there  is  certainly  nothing  he  has  not 
read— and  perfectly  assimilated.  No  writer  in  any  de 
partment  of  literature  can  more  distinctly  leave  the  im 
pression  of  acquaintance  with  the  modern  classics  of 
his  chosen  field  in  all  languages,  and  with  all  the  com 
mentaries  on  them.  There  is,  besides,  in  his  moral 
attitude,  his  turn  of  phrase,  his  absence  of  emphasis, 
his  esoteric  diction,  his  carelessness  of  communication, 
even,  his  air  of  noblesse  oblige,  his  patrician  fastidious 
ness  and  manifest  contentment  with  justification  by  his 
own  standards,  in  the  wide  range  of  his  exclusions,  and 
— above  all — in  his  preference  for  dealing  with  high 
differentiation  instead  of  the  elementary  and  universal, 
— in  all  this  there  is  clearly  manifest  the  aristocratic 
conformity  to  the  conclusions  of  culture  and  of  the  good 
taste  which  culture  can  alone — even  if  only — supply. 

There  is,  however,  this  peculiarity  about  his  culture, 
considered  as  an  element  of  his  equipment.  It  is  very 
far  from  being  with  him,  as  it  is  sometimes  assumed 
to  be  in  the  case  of  the  literary  or  other  artist,  a  handi 
cap  on  his  energy,  his  originality — an  emasculating 
rather  than  an  invigorating  force.  It  has,  on  the  con 
trary,  been  a  stimulant  as  well  as  a  guiding  agent  in  his 

383 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

activity.  But  its  singularity  consists  in  the  circum 
stance  that,  though  unmistakably  culture,  it  is  culture 
of  a  highly  specialized  kind.  Prominent  as  Mr.  James's 
culture  is,  in  a  word,  it  is  precisely  the  lack  of  back 
ground,  the  background  that  it  is  eminently  the  province 
of  culture  to  supply,  that  is  the  conspicuous  lack  in  his 
work  considered  as  a  whole,  considered  with  reference 
to  its  permanent  appeal,  considered,  in  brief,  as  a  con 
tribution  to  literature.  Is  there  any  other  writer  whose 
work,  taken  in  the  mass,  is  so  considerable  and  marked 
by  such  extreme  cleverness,  so  much  insight,  and  so 
much  real  power,  which  is  also  so  extremely  dependent 
upon  its  own  qualities  and  character  and  so  little  upon 
its  relations  and  correspondences?  It  is  so  altogether 
of  the  present  time,  of  the  moment,  that  it  seems  almost 
an  analogue  of  the  current  instantaneous  photography. 
Behind  it  one  feels  the  writer  interested,  not  in  Moliere 
but  in  Daudet,  not  in  Fielding  but  in  Trollope,  not  in 
Dante  but  in  The'ophile  Gautier.  He  writes  about  "Le 
Capitaine  Fracasse,"  not  about  "Don  Quixote,"  about 
the  "Come'die  Humaine,"  not  about  the  world  of 
Shakespeare.  This  is  treading  on  delicate  ground, 
and  where  the  end  of  culture  is  in  any  wise  so  conspicu 
ously  achieved  as  it  is  in  Mr.  James,  it  is  perhaps  im 
pertinent  to  inquire  as  to  his  use  of  the  means.  But 
where  a  writer's  work  is  so  voluminous  as  his,  as  well 
as  of  such  a  high  order,  it  is  in  the  interest  of  definition 
to  inquire  why  his  evident  culture  betrays  so  little  evi 
dence  of  interest  in  the  classics  of  literature  or  the  course 
of  history.  It  is  very  likely  true  that  for  the  writer  of 

384 


HENRY  JAMES 

modern  fiction  an  acquaintance  with  "Salammbd"  is 
of  more  instant  pertinence  than  saturation  with  the 
"  Divine  Comedy,"  that  such  an  essay  as  Mr.  James's 
on  Maupassant— a  very  nearly  perfect  masterpiece— is 
more  apposite  than  Lowell's — rather  inadequate — pa 
per  on  "  Don  Quixote."  I  only  point  out  that  from  the 
point  of  view  of  culture,  his  preoccupation  with  Du 
Maurier  and  Reinhart  and  Abbey  and  Stevenson  and 
Miss  Woolson  indicates  culture  of  an  unusually  con 
temporary  kind.  In  mere  point  of  time  Mme.  de  Sa- 
bran  is  as  far  back  as  I  remember  his  going.  How 
exquisite  his  treatment  of  these  more  or  less  current 
themes  has  occasionally  been  I  do  not  need  to  say,  or 
repeat.  If  in  the  last  analysis  there  is  a  tincture  of 
"journalism"  in  this,  it  is  journalism  of  a  very  high 
class,  and  perhaps  anything  nowadays  without  a  trace 
of  journalism  is  justly  to  be  suspected  of  pedantry  and 
pretension,  qualities  absolutely  foreign  to  Mr.  James's 
genius.  They  are  wholly  absent,  too,  in  such  "jour 
nalism"  as  his  books  of  travel,— the  "Little  Tour  in 
France,"  which  is  curiously  dependent  upon  "the  ex 
cellent  Mr.  Murray"  and  derives  from  the  "red-book" 
rather  than  from  the  library;  and  the  "Portraits  of 
Places,"  which,  however  abounding  in  penetration  and 
justesse, — I  recall  some  remarkable  pages  about  Tinto 
retto,  for  example, — is  too  enamored  of  the  actual  to 
think  twice  about  its  origins.  But  for  a  literary  figure 
that  seems  and  really  is  the  antipode  of  seme  of  the 
prominent  and  by  no  means  negligible  apostles  of 
crudity  of  the  present  day,  it  is  plain  that  his  rather  ex- 

385 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

elusive  interest  in  the  literature  of  the  present  day  is  a 
peculiarity  worth  remark.  The  man  is  always  more 
than  the  special  province  in  which  his  talent  is  exercised, 
and  Mr.  James's  culture  is  such  that  one  does  not  as 
sociate  him  with  such  writers  of  fiction  as  Wilkie  Col 
lins,  say,  so  much  as  with  Arnold  and  Lowell  and  Brown 
ing  and  Tennyson  and  Thackeray  and  George  Eliot 
and  Bulwer.  But  beside  any  one  of  these,  his  culture 
seems  quite  modern  and  current  in  its  substance  and 
preoccupations. 

It  is  not,  however,  merely  paradoxical,  and  therefore 
noteworthy,  that  his  culture  should  be  at  once  so  con 
spicuous  and  so  apparently  partial.  The  circumstance 
is  particularly  significant  because  it  is  particularly 
disadvantageous  to  his  impressiveness  as  a  writer  of 
fiction.  "L'artiste  moderne,"  says  Paul  Bourget,  "le- 
quel  se  double  tou jours  d'un  critique  et  d'un  £rudit." 
The  critic  is  conspicuous  enough  in  Mr.  James,  but  one 
cannot  help  thinking  that  precisely  his  kind  of  fiction 
would  be  more  effective  if  its  lining  were  more  evidently 
erudite.  For  example,  a  writer  interested  in  the  "An 
tigone,"  and  imbued  with  the  spirit  of  its  succession, 
would  naturally  and  instinctively  be  less  absorbed  in 
what  Maisie  knew, — to  mention  what  is  certainly  a  very 
remarkable,  but  what  is  also,  by  the  very  perfection  of 
its  execution,  shown  to  be  a  fantastic  book,  except  on 
the  supposition  that  whatever  is,  is  important.  Satu 
ration  with  contemporary  belles-lettres  will  no  doubt  suf 
fice  an  artist  whose  talent,  like  that  of  Mr.  James,  is  of 
the  first  class,  for  the  production  of  delightful  works, 

386 


HENRY  JAMES 

but  to  produce  works  for  the  pantheon  of  the  world's 
masterpieces  without  a  more  or  less  constant — even  if 
subconscious — reference  to  the  figures  already  on  their 
august  pedestals,  fringes  the  chimerical.  One  could 
wish  the  representative  American  novelist  to  be  less 
interested  in  inventing  a  new  game  of  fiction  than  in 
figuring  as  the  "heir  of  all  the  ages."  For  lovers  of 
"  the  last  new  book,"  Mr.  James's  is  no  doubt  the  most 
important.  But  why  should  it  not  be  an  "  event"— such 
as  one  of  Thackeray's  or  George  Eliot's  used  to  be? 
It  is  certainly  not  because  his  talent  is  inferior;  is  it 
because  his  culture  is  limited,  as  well  as  because,  as  I 
have  already  said,  his  art  is  as  theoretic  as  his  philosophy 
of  life  is  obscure  ? 

To  take  the  particular  instance  of  "The  Awkward 
Age,"  which  may  perhaps  be  called  Mr.  James's  tech 
nical  masterpiece  among  the  later  novels.  I  cannot 
better  explain  what  I  have  in  mind  in  speaking  of  his 
peculiar  kind  of  culture  than  by  saying  that  "The 
Awkward  Age"  strikes  one  as  a  little  like  Lilliput  with 
out  Gulliver.  One  has  only  to  imagine  what  Swift's 
picture  of  that  interesting  kingdom  would  be  if  the  fig 
ure  that  lends  it  its  significance  were  left  out  of  it. 
Its  significance,  of  course,  depends  wholly  on  the  sense 
of  contrast,  the  play  of  proportion.  So  does  the  signif 
icance  of  the  corresponding  Brobdingnag.  And  not 
at  all  exclusively  in  an  artistic  sense,  it  is  to  be  borne  in 
mind,  but  in  a  literary  and  human  one.  If  the  futilities 
and  niaiseries  of  "The  Awkward  Age,"  instead  of  be 
ing  idealized  by  the  main  strength  of  imputed  impor- 

387 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

tance,  were  depicted  from  a  standpoint  perhaps  even  less 
artistically  detached,  but  more  removed  in  spirit  by 
knowledge  of  and  interest  in  the  sociology  of  the  human 
species  previous  to  its  latest  illustration  by  a  wretched 
little  clique  of  negligible  Londoners,  the  negligibility  of 
these  dramatis  personce  would  be  far  more  forcefully 
felt.  It  would  constitute  a  thesis.  As  it  is,  the  thesis 
apparently  of  an  extraordinary  number  of  pages  is  that 
a  girl  freely  brought  up  may  turn  out  a  better  girl  than 
one  claustrally  reared.  Of  course  this  is  not  really  all. 
There  is  a  corollary — a  coda:  the  former  does  not  get 
married  and  the  latter  does.  And  there  is  a  still  fur 
ther  moral  to  be  drawn  by  those  expert  in  nuances  of 
the  kind.  But  one  feels  like  asking  brutally,  in  the 
name  of  literature,  if  this  order  of  it  is  worth  the  lavish 
expenditure  of  the  best  literary  talent  we  have.  If  it  is, 
there  is  nothing  more  to  be  said.  But  it  can  only  be 
so  considered  by  the  amateur  of  novelty,  and  must  seem 
attenuated  from  the  standpoint  of  culture. 

It  is  not  a  matter  of  realism.  Fielding  was  a  realist, 
if  ever  there  was  one.  But  is  it  likely  that  without  his 
classical  culture  such  a  realist  as  Fielding,  even,  would 
have  depicted  figures  of  such  commanding  importance 
and  universal  interest  as  those  with  which  his  novels  are 
peopled?  Can  one  fancy  Gibbon  praising  with  the 
same  elaborate  enthusiasm  that  he  expressed  for  "  Tom 
Jones"  the  " exquisite  picture  of  human  life  and  man 
ners"  provided  by  "The  Awkward  Age"  or  "The 
Other  House,"— supremely  clever  as  is  the  art  of  these 
books  and  their  fellows?  Nor  is  it  a  question  of  art. 

388 


HENRY  JAMES 

Meredith,  for  example,  is  not  a  realist  like  Mr.  James, 
but  his  art  constantly  suggests  that  of  the  younger 
writer.  Yet  it  differs  from  Mr.  James's  not  more  in 
its  preoccupations — with  the  fanciful,  that  is  to  say, 
rather  than  the  real — than  in  its  whole  attitude,  which, 
in  spite  of  its  absence  of  pedantry  and  close  correspond 
ence  to  the  matter  in  hand,  is  obviously,  markedly,  the 
attitude  of  culture,  the  attitude  of  not  being  absorbed  by, 
swamped  in,  the  importance  of  the  matter  in  hand,  but 
of  treating  it  at  least  enough  at  arm's  length  to  avoid 
exaggerating  its  importance.  He  leaves  the  impression 
of  a  certain  lack  of  seriousness.  He  has  the  air  of  the 
dilettante;  which,  to  my  sense,  Mr.  James  never  has. 
But  he  also  leaves  the  impression,  and  has  the  air  in 
separably  connected  with  what  is  understood  by  cul 
ture.  In  art  of  any  kind  at  the  present  time,  it  is  well 
known  that  culture  is  not  overvalued.  It  is  quite  gener 
ally  imagined  that  we  should  gain  rather  than  lose,  for 
instance,  by  having  Raphael  without  the  Church  and 
Rembrandt  without  the  Bible.  But  the  special  art  of 
fiction  has  not  yet  been  emancipated  to  this  implied  ex 
tent,  because  the  general  life  of  humanity,  of  which  this 
art  is  ex  hypothesi  a  picture,  is  felt  to  have  a  unity  su 
perior  in  interest  and  importance  to  any  of  its  variations. 
Too  great  an  interest  in  the  history,  as  well  as  in  the 
present  status,  of  mankind,  therefore,  can  hardly  be  ex 
acted  of  the  creator  of  a  mimic  world,  I  will  not  say  of 
Mr.  James's  pretensions,  for  he  makes  none,  but  of  his 
powers,  of  which  in  justice  too  much  cannot  be  exacted. 
A  novelist  in  whom  the  historic  sense  is  lacking  is,  one 

389 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

would  say,  particularly  liable  to  lack  also  that  sense  of 
proportion  which  alone  can  secure  the  right  emphasis 
and  accent  in  his  pictures  of  contemporary  life — if  they 
are  to  have  any  reach  and  compass  of  significance,  if 
they  are  to  rise  very  far  above  the  plane  of  art  for  art's 
sake.  From  the  point  of  view  of  culture  as  a  factor  in  a 
novelist's  production,  it  may  be  said,  surely,  that  no 
one  knows  his  own  time  who  knows  only  it.  Any  con 
spectus  of  the  sociology  of  the  present  day,  in  other 
words,  that  neglects  its  aspect  as  an  evolution,  neglects 
also  its  meaning.  The  life  of  the  present  day  can  no 
more  be  satisfactorily  represented  and  interpreted  in 
isolation  in  fiction  than  in  history  or  sociology.  To 
record  its  facts,  even  its  subtlest  and  most  recondite 
facts,  those  that  have  hitherto  been  neglected  by  more 
cursory  observers,  without  at  the  same  time  admeasur 
ing  them,  in  however  indirect  and  unconscious  fashion, 
by  reference  to  previous  stages  of  the  evolution,  or  at 
least  the  succession,  to  which  the  life  of  the  present  day 
belongs,  is,  measurably,  to  lose  sight  of  their  meaning, 
of  the  reason  for  recording  them.  As  Buckle  said, 
very  acutely,  any  one  who  thinks  a  fact  valuable  in  itself 
may  be  a  good  judge  of  facts,  but  cannot  be  of  value. 
And  it  is  hardly  too  much  to  say  that  this  is  how  Mr. 
James  impresses  us  in  his  recent  studies  of  English 
society,  the  studies  that,  taken  in  the  mass,  constitute 
the  bulk,  as  in  some  respects  they  do  the  flower,  of  his 
work.  He  is  an  excellent  judge  of  the  phenomena — the 
sharp-eyed  and  penetrating  critic  for  whom,  in  a  sense, 
perhaps,  this  extraordinary  and  extraordinarily  inept 

390 


HENRY  JAMES 

society  has  in  fancied  security  unwittingly  been  waiting. 
But  of  their  value  he  seems  to  be  less  a  judge  than  an 
advocate.  If  his  culture  included  such  development  of 
the  historic  sense  as  would  present  to  his  indirect  vision 
the  analogues  of  other  civilizations,  other  societies,  other 
milieux,  he  could  hardly  avoid  placing  as  well  as 
fixing  his  phenomena.  And  this  would,  I  think,  give 
an  altogether  different  aspect  and  value  to  his  work. 
In  illustration,  I  may  refer  to  a  portion — the  most  in 
teresting,  and,  I  am  inclined  to  think,  the  most  impor 
tant  though  not  perhaps  the  most  "wonderful"  portion 
— of  this  work  itself.  There  was  a  time  when  Mr. 
James  did  things  with  obvious  zest,  with  a  freedom  that 
excluded  the  notion  of  the  theoretic;  when  he  com 
municated  pleasure  by  first  feeling  it  himself;  when, 
therefore,  there  was  a  strong  personal  note  in  what  he 
wrote,  and  he  did  not  alienate  by  his  aloofness;  when, 
indeed,  one  could  perceive  and  enjoy  a  strain  of  positive 
gayety  in  his  compositions.  Has  any  reader  of  his,  I 
wonder,  any  doubt  as  to  the  period  I  have  in  mind  ? 
I  refer  to  the  period  of  his  studies  in  contemporary 
sociology,  so  to  speak,  the  years  when  the  contrast  be 
tween  America  and  Europe  preoccupied  him  so  de 
lightfully.  Then  he  produced  "documents"  of  real 
value  and  of  striking  vitality.  He  had  the  field  all  to 
himself,  and  worked  it  to  his  own  distinct  profit  and 
that  of  his  readers.  Then  he  portrayed  types  and  drew 
out  their  suggestiveness.  His  characters  were  not  only 
real,  but  representative.  He  provided  material  not  only 
for  the  keenest  enjoyment,  but  for  reflection.  His 

391 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

scientific  curiosity  resulted  in  something  eminently 
worth  while,  something  in  which  he  excelled  so  nota 
bly  as  virtually  to  seem,  if  indeed  he  was  not  literally, 
the  originator  of  a  new  and  most  engaging  genre  of  ro 
mance, — to  be,  one  may  say,  the  Bopp  of  the  compara 
tive  method  as  applied  to  fiction. 

The  literature  that  he  produced  at  this  period  owes 
its  superiority  to  his  current  product  in  general  import 
and  interest,  I  think,  precisely  to  this  factor  of  culture 
on  which  he  now  places  so  little  reliance.  It  was  in 
spired  and  penetrated  with  the  spirit  of  cosmopolitan 
ism,  that  is  to  say,  culture  in  which  the  contemporary 
is  substituted  for  the  more  universal  element,  and,  if 
it  does  not  quite  make  up  in  vividness  for  what  it  lacks 
in  breadth,  certainly  performs  the  similar  inestimable 
service  of  providing  a  standard  that  establishes  the  rela 
tive  value  and  interest  of  the  material  directly  dealt  with. 
Out  of  his  familiarity  with  contemporary  society  in 
America,  England,  France,  and  Italy,  grew  a  series  of 
novels  and  tales  that  were  full  of  vigor,  piquancy,  truth, 
and  significance.  The  play  of  the  characters  against 
contrasting  backgrounds  was  most  varied  and  interest 
ing.  The  contrasts  of  points  of  view,  of  conventions 
and  ideas,  of  customs  and  traditions,  gave  a  richness  of 
texture  to  the  web  of  his  fiction  which,  since  it  has 
lacked  these,  it  has  disadvantageously  lost.  His  return 
to  the  cosmopolitan  motif  in  "The  Ambassadors"  and 
(measurably)  in  "The  Golden  Bowl"  is  accordingly 
a  welcome  one,  and  would  be  still  more  welcome  if  the 
development  of  this  motif  were  not  now  incrusted  and 

392 


HENRY  JAMES 

obscured  with  mannerisms  of  presentation  accreted  in 
the  pursuit  of  what  no  doubt  seems  to  the  author  a 
"closer  correspondence  with  life,"  but  what  certainly 
seems  to  the  reader  a  more  restricted  order  of  art,— 
an  art,  at  any  rate,  so  largely  dependent  on  scrutiny 
as  perforce  to  dispense  with  the  significance  to  be  ex 
pected  only  of  the  culture  it  suggests,  but  does  not 
illustrate.  It  is  a  part  of  Mr.  James's  distinction  that 
he  gives  us  so  much  as  to  make  us  wish  for  more,  that 
he  entertains  us  on  so  high  a  plane  that  we  ask  to  be 
conducted  still  higher,  and  that  his  penetration  reveals 
to  us  such  wonders  in  the  particular  local,  that  we  call 
upon  him  to  show  us  "the  kingdoms  of  the  earth." 

VIII 

We  could  readily  forego  anything  that  he  lacks,  how 
ever,  if  he  would  demolish  for  us  the  chevaux-de-frise  of 
his  later  style.  In  early  days  his  style  was  eminently 
clear,  and  at  the  same  time  wholly  adequate,  but  in  the 
course  of  years  it  has  become  an  exceedingly  complicated 
vehicle.  Its  complexity  is  probably  quite  voluntary. 
Indeed,  like  his  whole  attitude,  it  is  even  theoretic.  It 
images,  no  doubt,  the  multifariousness  of  its  substance, 
of  which  it  follows  the  nuances  and  subtleties,  and  with 
its  parentheses  and  afterthoughts  and  qualifications,  its 
hints  and  hesitations,  its  indirection  and  innuendo,  pur 
sues  the  devious  and  haphazard  development  of  the 
drama  of  life  itself.  It  is  thoroughly  alive  and  sincere. 
It  has  mannerisms  but  no  affectations.  One  gets  tired 

393 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

of  the  frequent  recurrence  of  certain  favorite  words  and 
locutions,  but  the  author's  fondness  for  them  is  always 
genuine.  Least  of  all  are  they  perfunctory,  any  more 
than  is  any  other  manifestation  of  Mr.  James's  in 
tellectual  activity.  His  vocabulary  is  remarkable,  both 
in  range  and  in  intimate  felicity;  and  it  is  the  academic 
vocabulary,  rendered  vigorous  by  accents  of  raciness 
now  and  then,  the  acme  of  literary  breeding,  without, 
however,  a  trace  of  bookish  aridity.  He  is  less  desultory 
than  almost  any  writer  of  anything  like  his  productive 
ness.  His  scrupulous  care  involves  often  quite  need 
less  precautions,  as  if  the  reader  were  watching  for  a 
slip, — "like  a  terrier  at  a  rat-hole,"  a  sufferer  from 
his  superfluous  concessions  once  impatiently  observed. 
But  his  precision  involves  no  strain.  His  style  in  general 
shows  no  effort,  though  it  ought  to  be  said  that,  on  the 
other  hand,  it  also  shows  no  restraint.  It  is  tremen 
dously  personal  in  its  pointed  neglect  of  conformity  to 
any  ideal  of  what,  as  style,  it  should  be.  It  avoids  thus 
most  conspicuously  the  hackneyed  traits  of  rhetorical 
excellence.  And  certainly  the  pursuit  of  technical  per 
fection  may  easily  be  too  explicit,  too  systematic.  Cor 
rectness  is  perhaps  the  stupidest  way  of  achieving  arti 
ficiality.  But  a  writer  of  Mr.  James's  rhetorical  fertility, 
combined  with  his  distinction  in  the  matter  of  taste,  need 
have  no  fear  of  incurring  artificiality  in  deferring  to  the 
more  elementary  requirements  of  the  rhetorical  canon. 
He  has,  however,  chosen  to  be  an  original  writer  in  a 
way  that  precludes  him  from  being,  as  a  writer,  a  great 
one.  Just  as  his  theory  of  art  prevents  his  more  impor- 

394 


HENRY  JAMES 

tant  fiction  from  being  a  rounded  and  synthetic  image 
of  life  seen  from  a  certain  centralizing  point  of  view, 
and  makes  of  it  an  essay  at  conveying  the  sense  and 
illusion  of  life  by  following,  instead  of  focussing,  its 
phenomena,  so  his  theory  of  style  prevents  him  from 
creating  a  texture  of  expression  with  any  independent 
interest  of  its  own.  The  interest  of  his  expression  con 
sists  solely  in  its  correspondence  to  the  character  of 
what  it  endeavors  to  express.  So  concentrated  upon 
this  end  is  he  that  he  very  rarely  gives  scope  to  the 
talent  for  beautiful  and  effective  expression  which 
occasional  lapses  from  his  rigorous  practice  show  him 
to  possess  in  a  distinguished  degree.  There  are  entire 
volumes  of  his  writings  that  do  not  contain  a  sentence 
like,  for  example,  this  from  a  brief  essay  on  Hawthorne: 
"His  beautiful  and  light  imagination  is  the  wing  that  on 
the  autumn  evening  just  brushes  the  dusky  pane."  Of 
a  writer  who  has  this  touch,  this  capacity,  in  his  equip 
ment,  it  is  justifiable  to  lament  that  his  theory  of  art  has 
so  largely  prevented  his  exercise  of  it.  The  fact  that  his 
practice  has  not  atrophied  the  faculty — clear  enough 
from  a  rare  but  perfect  exhibition  of  it  from  time  to 
time — only  increases  our  regret.  We  do  not  ask  of  Mr. 
James's  fastidiousness  the  purple  patch  of  poetic  prose, 
any  more  than  we  expect  from  him  any  kind  of  medioc 
rity  whatever.  But  when  a  writer,  who  shows  us  un 
mistakably  now  and  then  that  he  could  give  us  frequent 
equivalents  of  such  episodes  as  the  death  of  Ralph 
Touchett,  rigorously  refrains  through  a  long  series  of 
admirable  books  from  producing  anything  of  greater 

395 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

extent  than  a  sentence  or  a  paragraph  that  can  be  called 
classic,  that  has  the  classic  "note,"  we  may,  I  think, 
legitimately  complain  that  his  theory  of  art  is  exasperat- 
ingly  exacting. 

And  of  what  may  be  called  the  strategy,  in  distinction 
from  the  tactics,  of  style  he  is  quite  as  pointedly  negli 
gent.  The  elements  of  combination,  distribution,  cli 
max,  the  whole  larger  organization  and  articulation  of 
literary  presentment,  are  dissembled,  if  not  disdained. 
Even  if  it  be  possible  to  secure  a  greater  sense  of  life 
by  eliminating  the  sense  of  art  in  the  general  treatment 
of  a  fiction, — which  is  certainly  carrying  the  theory  of 
ars  celare  artem  very  far  (the  first  word  in  the  aphorism 
having  hitherto  stood  for  "art,"  and  the  last  for  "arti 
fice"), — even  if  in  attitude  and  construction,  that  is  to 
say,  the  amount  of  life  in  Mr.  James's  books  atones 
for  the  absence  of  the  visible,  sensible,  satisfying  ele 
ment  of  art  as  art,  it  is  nevertheless  clear  that  in  style 
as  such  there  is  nothing  whatever  that  can  atone  for  the 
absence  of  art.  Skill  is  an  insufficient  substitute;  it  is 
science,  not  art,  that  is  the  adaptation  of  means  to  ends. 
And  upon  skill  Mr.  James  places  his  whole  reliance. 

He  is,  of  course,  supremely  skilful.  His  invention, 
for  example,  which  has  almost  the  force  and  value  of  the 
creative  imagination,  appears  in  particularly  exhaust- 
less  variety  in  the  introductions  of  his  short  stories. 
Each  one  is  a  study  in  exordiums,  as  skilful  as  Cicero  Js. 
And  the  way  in  which  the  narrative  proceeds,  the 
characters  are  introduced,  and  the  incidents  succeed 
one  another,  is  most  attentively  considered.  But 

396 


HENRY   JAMES 

no  amount  of  skill  and  care  compensate  for  the  loss  of 
integral  interest  in  the  handling,  the  technic,  the  style, 
that  is  involved  in  a  subordination  of  style  to  content  so 
complete  as  positively  to  seem  designed  to  flout  the 
traditional  convention  which  makes  the  interpenetra- 
tion  of  the  two  the  ideal.  Such  an  ideal  is  perhaps  a 
little  too  obvious  for  Mr.  James,  who  is  as  uninterested 
in  "  the  obvious  "  as  he  is  unconcerned  about  "  the  sub 
lime,"  of  which,  according  to  a  time-honored  theory, 
the  obvious  is  a  necessary  constituent. 

The  loss  of  interest  involved  in  obscurity  is,  to  begin 
with,  enormous.  Such  elaborate  care  as  that  of  Mr. 
James  should  at  least  secure  clearness.  But  with  all 
his  scrupulousness,  clearness  never  seems  to  be  an  object 
of  his  care.  At  least,  this  is  true  of  his  later  work.  In 
his  earlier,  his  clearness  was  conspicuous.  There  are 
even  extremely  flat-footed  things  to  be  encountered  in 
it  now  and  then — as,  for  example,  his  reprehension  of 
the  trivial  in  Hawthorne,  the  "parochial"  in  Thoreau. 
But  since  his  later,  his  preponderant,  and  what  we 
must  consider  his  true,  manner  has  been  established, 
no  one  needs  to  be  reminded  that  obscurity  has  been  one 
of  its  main  traits.  His  concern  is  to  be  precise,  not  to 
be  clear.  He  follows  his  thought  with  the  most  intimate 
exactness — no  doubt — in  its  subtile  sinuosities,  into  its 
complicated  connotations,  unto  its  utmost  attenuations; 
but  it  is  often  so  elusive,  so  insaisissdble — by  others 
than  himself — that  he  may  perfectly  express  without 
in  the  least  communicating  it.  Yet  the  very  texture 
of  his  obscurity  is  composed  of  incontestable  evidences 

397 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

that  he  is  a  master  of  expression.    The  reader's  pleasure 
becomes  a  task,  and  his  task  the  torture  of  Tantalus. 

It  is  simply  marvellous  that  such  copiousness  can  be 
so  elliptical.  It  is  usually  in  greater  condensation — 
such  as  Emerson's — that  we  miss  the  connectives. 
The  fact  attests  the  remarkable  fulness  of  his  intellec 
tual  operations,  but  such  plenitude  imposes  the  -neces 
sity  of  restraint  in  direct  proportion  to  the  unusual  ex 
tent  and  complexity  of  its  material.  "Simplification" 
is  a  favorite  word  with  Mr.  James,  but  he  himself  never 
simplifies  for  our  benefit.  Beyond  question,  he  does 
for  his  own.  He  has  clearly  preliminarily  mastered  his 
complicated  theme  in  its  centrality;  he  indisputably  sits 
in  the  centre  of  the  web  in  whose  fine-spun  meshes  his 
readers  are  entangled.  If  in  reading  one  of  his  fictions 
you  are  conscious  of  being  in  a  maze,  you  know  that 
there  is  an  issue  if  you  are  but  clever  enough  to  find  it. 
Mr.  James  gives  you  no  help.  He  flatters  you  by  assum 
ing  that  you  are  sufficiently  clever.  His  work,  he  seems 
to  say,  is  done  when  he  has  constructed  his  labyrinth 
in  emulating  correspondence  with  the  complexity  of  his 
model,  life,  and  at  the  same  time  furnished  a  potentially 
discoverable  clue  to  it.  There  are  readers  who  find  the 
clue,  it  is  not  to  be  doubted,  and  follow  it  in  all  its  ser 
pentine  wanderings,  though  they  seem  to  do  so  in  virtue 
of  a  special  sense — the  sense,  it  might  be  called,  of 
understandingly  savoring  Mr.  James.  But  its  possess 
ors  are  marked  individuals  in  every  one's  acquaintance; 
and  it  need  not  be  said  that  they  are  exceptionally  clever 
people.  There  are  others,  the  mystically  inclined,  and 

398 


HENRY   JAMES 

therefore  perhaps  more  numerous,  who  divine  the  sig 
nificance  that  is  hidden  from  the  wise  and  prudent. 
But  to  the  majority  of  intelligent  and  cultivated  readers, 
whose  appreciation  constitutes  fame,  the  great  mass  of 
his  later  writing  is  of  a  difficulty  to  conquer  which  re 
quires  an  amount  of  effort  disproportionate  to  the  sense 
of  assured  reward. 

Are  the  masterpieces  of  the  future  to  be  written  in 
this  fashion  ?  If  they  are,  they  will  differ  signally  from 
the  masterpieces  of  the  past  in  the  substitution  of  a 
highly  idiosyncratic  manner  for  the  hitherto  essential 
element  of  style;  and  in  consequence  they  will  require 
a  second  reading,  not,  as  heretofore,  for  the  discovery 
of  "new  beauties,"  or  the  savoring  again  of  old  ones,  but 
to  be  understood  at  all.  In  which  case,  one  may  sur 
mise,  they  will  have  to  be  very  well  worth  while.  It  can 
hardly  be  hoped  that  they  will  be  as  well  worth  while 
as  those  of  Mr.  James,  and  the  chances  are,  accordingly, 
that  he  will  occupy  the  very  nearly  unique  niche  in  the 
history  of  fiction — hard  by  that  of  Meredith,  perhaps — 
of  being  the  last  as  well  as  the  first  of  his  line.  There 
is  no  question  of  its  eminence  or  of  his  powers.  But 
what  chiefly  distinguishes  his  fiction  is  the  extraordi 
narily  high  differentiation  of  his  material  and  the  com 
plicated  treatment  that  matches  it.  His  talent,  his 
method,  his  point  of  view  are  extremely  personal.  He 
is  too  idiosyncratic  to  have  rivals  or  successors.  He  has 
a  host  of  imitators,  it  is  true;  he  has,  in  a  way,  founded 
a  school,  but  as  yet  certainly  this  has  produced  no 
masterpieces.  Has  he  himself?  If  so,  they  are,  at  all 

399 


AMERICAN  PROSE  MASTERS 

events,  not  unmistakably  of  the  scale  and  on  the  plane 
suggested  by  his  unmistakable  powers,— powers  that 
make  it  impossible  to  measure  him  otherwise  than  by 
the  standards  of  the  really  great  novelists  and  of  the 
masters  of  English  prose. 


400 


14  DAY  USE 


14  DAY  USE 

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